Crime in detective novels at the intersection of reality and fiction: An examplary reading of Ayşe Erbulak's novels

The long-discussed nexus between fiction and reality reveals itself in certain parts of life such as through the effect of media on authors or the formation of a reality-based fictional universe by authors to enhance the construction of the text. The present study aims at demonstrating how reality is mirrored in fictional texts by using quantitative methods. The relationship between fiction and reality is evaluated by comparing the main characteristics of real crime cases and the fictional crimes constructed in seven detective novels written by Turkish author Ayşe Erbulak. The data related to real crime cases in Turkey were collected from non-governmental organizations, newspapers, and archives. The resulting real crime dataset covers the time period of 2010-2020 and includes 3488 cases. Real and fictional crime cases were, first, examined through the main characteristics of crimes such as the murderer, the deceased, the degree of relationship between the murderer and the deceased, the murder weapon, the murder site, and the reason for murder. Second, if at least three of these six characteristics overlap, a similarity between real and fictional crime cases was identified. Last, average similarity scores were calculated for each of the seven detective novels authored by Ayşe Erbulak. The structural analysis over real and fictional crime cases was followed by contextual analyses and semi-structured interviews with the author. Analyses results indicate that each detective novel examined has an average similarity score of maximum 1%. This might suggest that the author has not benefitted from the realities happenning in the society. However, low similarity scores are found to be mostly attributed to the disproportion between the sample size of fictional crime cases (27) and the sample size of real crime cases (3488). Low similarity scores, on the contrary, can also indicate that the author, in fact, has benefitted from and mirrored the realities in her novels. The idea behind this argument is that if the author has randomly selected the characteristics of the constructed crimes in her novels, then the similarity scores would approximate to the characteristics of the most common real crime cases in society, and, thus, would lead to higher similarity scores. Based on the results of structural and contextual analyses together with the inferences drawn upon semi-structured interviews with the author, the study finds that fiction is not completely disconnected from the reality. In other words, it cannot be surely argued that the reality does not have an impact on fiction. To understand the relationship between fiction and reality, further research should be conducted by using similar quantitative methods with greater sample sizes.