Despite the title “Blood on the Dining Room Floor,” this is not a detective story. Gertrude Stein is a cipher and experimenter who writes about herself and at the same time about everything in the world. It is impossible to understand the background of the book without reading the preface of the American publisher, which talks about the intricate biographical basis of this work. “I tried to write a detective story myself, well, not just to just write it like that, because trying is torture, but I tried to write. The name was good, it was called blood on the floor in the dining room and that’s exactly what was discussed there, but there was no corpse there and the investigation was carried out in the broad sense of the word. But I still took it and wrote it, and what came out was such a wonderful detective story, but no one was investigating anything there and there were only conversations, so by and large it turned out to be no detective story at all and I finally decided that, in general, the detective there must be an end, but my detective had no end.”