Detective fiction


Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—whether professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as speculative fiction and other genre fiction in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained extremely popular, particularly in novels. Some of the most famous heroes of detective fiction include C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Kogoro Akechi, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Juvenile stories featuring The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and The Boxcar Children have also remained in print for several decades.

History

Ancient

Some scholars, such as R. H. Pfeiffer, have suggested that certain ancient and religious texts bear similarities to what would later be called detective fiction. In the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders, the account told by two witnesses broke down when Daniel cross-examines them. In response, author Julian Symons has argued that "those who search for fragments of detection in the Bible and Herodotus are looking only for puzzles" and that these puzzles are not detective stories.

Early Arabic

One Thousand and One Nights contains several of the earliest detective stories, anticipating modern detective fiction. The oldest known example of a detective story is "The Three Apples", one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the One Thousand and One Nights. In this story, a fisherman discovers a heavy, locked chest along the Tigris river, which he then sells to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid. When Harun breaks open the chest, he discovers the body of a young woman who has been cut into pieces. Harun then orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and to find the murderer within three days, or be executed if he fails in his assignment. Suspense is generated through multiple plot twists that occur as the story progresses. With these characteristics this may be considered an archetype for detective fiction. It anticipates the use of reverse chronology in modern detective fiction, where the story begins with a crime before presenting a gradual reconstruction of the past.
The main difference between Ja'far and later fictional detectives, such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, is that Ja'far has no desire to solve the case. The whodunit mystery is solved when the murderer himself confesses his crime. This in turn leads to another assignment in which Ja'far has to find the culprit who instigated the murder within three days or else be executed. Ja'far again fails to find the culprit before the deadline, but owing to chance, he discovers a key item. In the end, he manages to solve the case through reasoning in order to prevent his own execution.
On the other hand, two other Arabian Nights stories, "The Merchant and the Thief" and "Ali Khwaja", contain two of the earliest fictional detectives, who uncover clues and present evidence to catch or convict a criminal known to the audience, with the story unfolding in normal chronology and the criminal already known to the audience. The latter involves a climax where the titular detective protagonist Ali Khwaja presents evidence from expert witnesses in a court.

Early Chinese

is an early genre of Chinese detective fiction.
Some well-known stories include the Yuan dynasty story Circle of Chalk, the Ming dynasty story collection Bao Gong An and the 18th century Di Gong An story collection. The latter was translated into English as Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee by Dutch sinologist Robert Van Gulik, who then used the style and characters to write the original Judge Dee series.
The hero/detective of these novels was typically a traditional judge or similar official based on historical personages such as Judge Bao or Judge Dee. Although the historical characters may have lived in an earlier period most stories are written in the later Ming or Qing dynasty period.
These novels differ from the Western tradition in several points as described by Van Gulik:
  • The detective is the local magistrate who is usually involved in several unrelated cases simultaneously;
  • The criminal is introduced at the very beginning of the story and his crime and reasons are carefully explained, thus constituting an inverted detective story rather than a "puzzle";
  • The stories have a supernatural element with ghosts telling people about their death and even accusing the criminal;
  • The stories are filled with digressions into philosophy, the complete texts of official documents, and much more, resulting in long books; and
  • The novels tend to have a huge cast of characters, typically in the hundreds, all described with their relation to the various main actors in the story.
Van Gulik chose Di Gong An to translate because in his view it was closer to the Western literary style and more likely to appeal to non-Chinese readers.
A number of Gong An works may have been lost or destroyed during the Literary Inquisitions and the wars in ancient China. In traditional Chinese culture, this genre was not prestigious, and was therefore considered less worthy of preservation than works of philosophy or poetry.

Early Western

One of the earliest examples of detective fiction in Western literature is Voltaire's Zadig, which features a main character who performs feats of analysis. Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams by William Godwin portrays the law as protecting the murderer and destroying the innocent. Thomas Skinner Sturr's anonymous Richmond, or stories in the life of a Bow Street officer was published in London in 1827; the Danish crime story The Rector of Veilbye by Steen Steensen Blicher was written in 1829; and the Norwegian crime novel Mordet paa Maskinbygger Roolfsen by Maurits Hansen was published in December 1839.
"Das Fräulein von Scuderi" is an 1819 short story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which Mlle de Scudery establishes the innocence of the police's favorite suspect in the murder of a jeweller. This story is sometimes cited as the first detective story and as a direct influence on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Also suggested as a possible influence on Poe is 'The Secret Cell', a short story published in September 1837 by William Evans Burton. It has been suggested that this story may have been known to Poe, who worked for Burton in 1839. The story was about a London policeman who solves the mystery of a kidnapped girl. Burton's fictional detective relied on practical methods such as dogged legwork, knowledge of the underworld and undercover surveillance, rather than brilliance of imagination or intellect.

English genre establishment

Detective fiction in the English-language literature is considered to have begun in 1841 with the publication of Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", featuring "the first fictional detective, the eccentric and brilliant C. Auguste Dupin". When the character first appeared, the word detective had not yet been used in English; however, the character's name, "Dupin", originated from the English word dupe or deception. Poe devised a "plot formula that's been successful ever since, give or take a few shifting variables." Poe followed with further Auguste Dupin tales: "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" in 1842 and "The Purloined Letter" in 1844.
Poe referred to his stories as "tales of ratiocination". In stories such as these, the primary concern of the plot is ascertaining truth, and the usual means of obtaining the truth is a complex and mysterious process combining intuitive logic, astute observation, and perspicacious inference. "Early detective stories tended to follow an investigating protagonist from the first scene to the last, making the unravelling a practical rather than emotional matter." "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" is particularly interesting because it is a barely fictionalized account based on Poe's theory of what happened to the real-life Mary Cecilia Rogers.
William Russell was among the first English authors to write fictitious 'police memoirs', contributing an irregular series of stories to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal between 1849 and 1852. Unauthorised collections of his stories were published in New York City in 1852 and 1853, entitled The Recollections of a Policeman. Twelve stories were then collated into a volume entitled Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer, published in London in 1856.
Literary critic Catherine Ross Nickerson credits Louisa May Alcott with creating the second-oldest work of modern detective fiction, after Poe's Dupin stories, with the 1865 thriller "V.V., or Plots and Counterplots." A short story published anonymously by Alcott, the story concerns a Scottish aristocrat who tries to prove that a mysterious woman has killed his fiancée and cousin. The detective on the case, Antoine Dupres, is a parody of Auguste Dupin who is less concerned with solving the crime than he is in setting up a way to reveal the solution with a dramatic flourish. Ross Nickerson notes that many of the American writers who experimented with Poe's established rules of the genre were women, inventing a subgenre of domestic detective fiction that flourished for several generations. These included Metta Fuller Victor's two detective novels The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight. The Dead Letter is noteworthy as the first full-length work of American crime fiction.
Émile Gaboriau was a pioneer of the detective fiction genre in France. In Monsieur Lecoq, the title character is adept at disguise, a key characteristic of detectives. Gaboriau's writing is also considered to contain the first example of a detective minutely examining a crime scene for clues.
Another early example of a whodunit is a subplot in the novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens. The conniving lawyer Tulkinghorn is killed in his office late one night, and the crime is investigated by Inspector Bucket of the Metropolitan police force. Numerous characters appeared on the staircase leading to Tulkinghorn's office that night, some of them in disguise, and Inspector Bucket must penetrate these mysteries to identify the murderer. Dickens also left a novel unfinished at his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Dickens's protégé, Wilkie Collins —sometimes called the "grandfather of English detective fiction"—is credited with the first great mystery novel, The Woman in White. T. S. Eliot called Collins's novel The Moonstone "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels... in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe", and Dorothy L. Sayers called it "probably the very finest detective story ever written". The Moonstone contains a number of ideas that have established in the genre several classic features of the 20th century detective story:
  • English country house robbery
  • An "inside job"
  • red herrings
  • A celebrated, skilled, professional investigator
  • Bungling local constabulary
  • Detective inquiries
  • Large number of false suspects
  • The "least likely suspect"
  • A rudimentary "locked room" murder
  • A reconstruction of the crime
  • A final twist in the plot
Although The Moonstone is usually seen as the first detective novel, there are other contenders for the honor. A number of critics suggest that the lesser known Notting Hill Mystery, written by the pseudonymous "Charles Felix", preceded it by a number of years and first used techniques that would come to define the genre.
Literary critics Chris Willis and Kate Watson consider Mary Elizabeth Braddon's first book, the even earlier The Trail of the Serpent, to be the first British detective novel. The Trail of the Serpent "features an innovative detective figure, Mr. Peters, who is lower class and mute, and who is initially dismissed both by the text and its characters." Braddon's later and better-remembered work, Aurora Floyd, also features a compelling detective in the person of Detective Grimstone of Scotland Yard.
Tom Taylor's melodrama The Ticket-of-Leave Man, an adaptation of Léonard by Édouard Brisbarre and Eugène Nus, appeared in 1863, introducing Hawkshaw the Detective. In short, it is difficult to establish who was the first to write the English-language detective novel, as various authors were exploring the theme simultaneously.
Anna Katharine Green, in her 1878 debut The Leavenworth Case and other works, popularized the genre among middle-class readers and helped to shape the genre into its classic form as well as developed the concept of the series detective.
In 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, arguably the most famous of all fictional detectives. Although Sherlock Holmes is not the first fictional detective, his name has become synonymous for the part. Conan Doyle stated that the character of Holmes was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, for whom Doyle had worked as a clerk at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Like Holmes, Bell was noted for drawing large conclusions from the smallest observations. A brilliant London-based "consulting detective" residing at 221B Baker Street, Holmes is famous for his intellectual prowess and is renowned for his skillful use of astute observation, deductive reasoning, and forensic skills to solve difficult cases. Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, and all but four stories are narrated by Holmes's friend, assistant, and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson.