The Detective Novel in Ladino: Clues to a Little Known Genre.

The end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth saw the emergence of the detective novel in Europe and in the United States and it soon became a social phenomenon. In the countries pertaining to the Ottoman Empire the Sephardim were no exception; they, too, were avid readers of these detective novels. As was true of much of the literature published in Ladino at this time, these novels were translated from other languages. They were aljamiados, that is to say written in Hebrew script and published in Salonica. In most cases each novel was about forty pages long and generally published as a separate book, although some novels were published in instalments in the Ladino newspapers of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]