History of Detective Fiction

Das Fräulein von Scuderi", 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, is sometimes cited as the first detective story and a direct influence on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".[10] Also suggested as a possible influence on Poe is ‘The Secret Cell’, a short story published in September 1837 by William Evans Burton, describing how a London policeman solves the mystery of a kidnapped girl. Burton’s fictional detective relies on practical methods - dogged legwork, knowledge of the underworld and undercover surveillance - rather than brilliance of imagination or intellect, but it has been suggested this story may have been known to Poe, who in 1839 worked for Burton.[11] However, true detective fiction is more often considered in the English-speaking world to have begun in 1841 with the publication of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" itself,[8] featuring "the first fictional detective, the eccentric and brilliant C. Auguste Dupin". Poe devised a "plot formula that's been successful ever since, give or take a few shifting variables."[12] Poe followed with further Auguste Dupin tales: "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" in 1843 and "The Purloined Letter" in 1845.

Poe referred to his stories as "tales of ratiocination".[8] 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 unraveling a practical rather than emotional matter."[12] "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.

Émile Gaboriau was a pioneer of the detective fiction genre in France. In Monsieur Lecoq (1868), the title character is adept at disguise, a key characteristic of detectives.[13] Gaboriau's writing is also considered to contain the first example of a detective minutely examining a crime scene for clues.[14]

Another early example of a whodunit is a subplot in the novel Bleak House (1853) 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's protégé, Wilkie Collins (1824–1889)—sometimes referred to as 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 (1868) "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels... in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe",[15] and Dorothy L. Sayers called it "probably the very finest detective story ever written".[16] 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, a number of critics suggest that the lesser known Notting Hill Mystery (1862–63), written by the pseudonymous "Charles Felix", preceded it by a number of years and first used techniques that would come to define the genre.[17][18] In 1952, William Buckler identified the author of the novel as Charles Warren Adams and in 2011 American investigator Paul Collins found a number of lines of evidence that confirmed Buckler's initial claim.[17][19]

In 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the most famous of all fictional detectives. Although Sherlock Holmes is not the original fiction detective (he was influenced by Poe's Dupin and Gaboriau's Lecoq), his name has become a byword 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.[20] 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 astuteobservation, 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