The Russian storyteller Alexander Andreevich Shklyarevsky (1837–1883), according to V. V. Krestovsky, belonged to the “working class of journal literature,” which—quite justly—can be called the literary convict class.
All his life Shklyarevsky was forced to fight poverty. For more than ten years he taught, publishing articles in various newspapers and magazines at the same time. A man generously endowed with talent, he achieved neither financial benefits nor literary recognition, although he is precisely the one who can be called “the father of the Russian detective story.”
Shklyarevsky earned his fame as the “Russian Gaboriau” in the late 1860s as the author of numerous criminal tales and novels.
In Shklyarevsky’s “criminal” works, the name of the criminal is often known to the reader already in the middle of the book. The main focus is not the detective and the investigation process, but the criminal’s experiences and the reasons that drove him to crime. In this sense, the novel published in this volume, “What Led to Murder?”, is indicative.