The detective story is a type of fiction that features the dogged quest for the perpetrator of a vile crime. The question of “whodunit” keeps challenging all kinds of detectives in novels and short stories, as well as in films, radio and television series, and stage plays.
Contemporary crime writers generally specialize in hard-boiled thrillers, with tough language and rough action, or “cozies,” in which the characters are more refined and the violence is less explicit. Both styles make use of red-herring, or misleading, clues and phony suspects to confuse everyone except the clever detective, who can always unravel the case.
The mystery may be solved by a professional police detective, like Agatha Christie’s Monsieur Hercule Poirot (introduced in 1920), who has “little grey cells” of deduction; or by a busybody amateur, like Christie’s Miss Jane Marple (introduced in 1942), who depends upon intuition and gossip; or by kooky partners, like Tommy and Tuppence Beresford (introduced in 1922), who seemingly stumble upon the right answers. Christie’s most audacious character innovation mocked the conventions of the genre and infuriated armchair detectives: in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) the narrator (an acquaintance of Poirot) turned out to be the murderer.
The professionals in contemporary detective fiction are most likely to be private eyes (PIs, or private investigators), who have been hired specifically to prove someone’s innocence or guilt—for example, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer or his postfeminist counterpart, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski. The first real PI was François-Eugène Vidocq, a reformed thief who started the first official private detective bureau in Paris in 1817. His memoirs (1828–29) inspired the American short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe to write “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). In what Poe called a ratiocinative (purely deductive) tale, a brutal double murder baffles the French police but is solved by C. Auguste Dupin—the model for thousands of other literary detectives who operate with cool logic and without official status. The last of Poe’s three “Tales” about Dupin was printed in 1845. Although they were later credited as the first detective stories, the word detective never appeared in any of them.
Called the “Edgar Allan Poe of France,” Émile Gaboriau wrote the first long detective story and was far more successful than Poe with detective fiction. In 1866 he began publishing installments of The Widow Lerouge, the first of 21 serial novels. Gaboriau used the two basic detective types—Père Tabaret, an amateur, and Monsieur Lecoq, the professional.
Detective fiction was introduced into England by Wilkie Collins with The Moonstone and its memorable detective, Sergeant Cuff, in 1868—still one of the best mystery stories ever written. (Collins’ other masterpiece, The Woman in White, had appeared in 1860, but it was a pure mystery, not a story of detection.) Novelist Charles Dickens had also been intrigued by this type of fiction, but he died in 1870 before finishing The Mystery of Edwin Drood—still a challenge to literary detectives.
The first detective novel written in the United States was by a woman, Anna Katharine Green, whose The Leavenworth Case appeared in 1878; her hero was a New York police detective. The first best seller of literary crime was an 1886 Australian thriller: The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume. The next year marked the debut of Sherlock Holmes, the first scientific detective. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a British physician, wrote four novels and 56 short stories about the immortal Holmes. After two dozen stories, Doyle killed off his hero, but he was forced by public demand to publish a reminiscence in 1902 and then pull off an ingenious resurrection in 1905. One of the best of the Holmes imitations that followed was Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, the creation of R. Austin Freeman (also a physician), who appeared in The Red Thumb Mark in 1907. Between 1911 and 1935 G.K. Chesterton published five collections of Father Brown stories. John Dickson Carr, whose specialty was the locked-room puzzle in medieval England, modeled one of his detectives (Dr. Gideon Fell) after Chesterton.
The fallible Philip Trent of Trent’s Last Case (1913) by E.C. Bentley was the antithesis of Holmes. Bentley’s lighthearted treatment of murder later influenced such authors as Dorothy L. Sayers, the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, and Cyril Hare. The golden era of British detective fiction began in 1920 with Freeman Wills Crofts’s The Cask. The most prolific mystery writer ever was John Creasey, creator of The Toff and author of more than 500 novels.
In the United States Mary Roberts Rinehart specialized in mystery romances, such as The Circular Staircase (1908) and Haunted Lady (1942). Carolyn Wells, author of The Clue (1909), wrote three or four detective novels a year. Melville Davisson Post, an American lawyer who began writing crime tales for magazines in 1896, used his legal background in stories that featured Randolph Mason and, later, Uncle Abner of backwoods Virginia.
Three popular American sleuths made their debut in the 1920s. Charlie Chan was introduced by Earl Derr Biggers in The House Without a Key (1925). The bicultural Chan, who endlessly quotes Confucian sayings, was based on a real Honolulu police detective. Next was the urbane Philo Vance, developed by S.S. Van Dine (the pen name of art critic Willard Huntington Wright). The Benson Murder Case (1926) was the first of a planned even dozen novels—each (except for The Gracie Allen Murder Case) designed with a six-letter name in the title. Van Dine influenced the creation of Ellery Queen, who appeared in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929). The mystery writer Queen was both hero and author (the pen name of Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay). As Barnaby Ross, they wrote four books about Drury Lane, an actor-detective (collected as The XYZ Murders).
With new standards of realism, Dashiell Hammett invented the hard-boiled school. The tough, distinctly American style was polished by Raymond Chandler. Hammett’s Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe were portrayed in classic films. Others were Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, and Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer.
The Inspector Maigret stories of police procedure, written by the Belgian-born French writer Georges Simenon, developed an international following. The style was taken up by Ed McBain in America and J.J. Marric in England. In the Netherlands, Robert van Gulik wrote the Judge Dee mysteries, set in medieval China. U.S. lawyer Scott Turow depicted the criminal justice system in such best sellers as The Burden of Proof (1990) and Pleading Guilty (1993).