ABSTRACT
Common to the majority of the critical studies of historical crime fiction is the identification of significant parallels between the detective and the historian. The methods of William of Baskerville, the detective figure in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980, first published in English in 1983), for example, have clear parallels with the approach of the modern historian: he weighs up evidence and attempts to establish a chain of cause and effect in order to construct a narrative of the past (Ford 2000: 97). Not just literary critics, but historians, too, have recognised the parallels, and the historian Robin Winks comments on the similarities between the work of historians and that of fictional detectives as follows: ‘The historian must collect, interpret, and then explain his evidence by methods which
are not greatly different from those techniques employed by the detective, or at least the detective in fiction’ (Winks 1968: xiii). What is significant about both Winks’s observation and William of Baskerville’s methods is that in both cases the task of both the historian and the detective is implicitly identified as an interpretative one.
