The traditional elements of the
detective story
are: (1) the seemingly perfect crime; (2) the wrongly accused suspect
at whom circumstantial evidence points; (3) the bungling of dim-witted
police; (4) the greater powers of observation and superior mind of the detective;
and (5) the startling and unexpected denouement, in which the detective
reveals how the identity of the culprit was ascertained. Detective
stories frequently operate on the principle that superficially
convincing evidence is ultimately irrelevant. Usually it is also
axiomatic that the clues from which a logical solution to the problem
can be reached be fairly presented to the reader at exactly the same
time that the sleuth receives them and that the sleuth deduce the
solution to the puzzle from a logical interpretation of these clues.
The first detective story was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe,
published in April 1841. The profession of detective had come into
being only a few decades earlier, and Poe is generally thought to have
been influenced by the Mémoires (1828–29) of François-Eugène Vidocq, who in 1817 founded the world''s first detective bureau, in Paris. Poe''s fictional French detective, C.
Auguste Dupin, appeared in two other stories, “The
Mystery of Marie
Roget” (1845) and “The Purloined Letter” (1845). The detective story
soon expanded to novel length.
The French author Émile Gaboriau''s L''Affaire Lerouge (1866) was an enormously successful novel that had several sequels. Wilkie Collins'' The Moonstone
(1868) remains one of the finest English detective
novels. Anna
Katharine Green became one of the first American detective novelists
with The Leavenworth Case (1878). The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) by the Australian Fergus Hume was a phenomenal commercial success.
Sherlock Holmes (right) explaining to Dr. Watson what he has deduced from a pipe left behind by a …
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The greatest of all fictional
detectives, Sherlock Holmes, along with his loyal, somewhat obtuse companion Dr. Watson, made his first appearance in Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Conan Doyle''s novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) and continued into the 20th century in such collections of stories as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894) and the longer Hound of the Baskervilles
(1902). So great was the appeal of Sherlock Holmes''s detecting style
that the death of Conan Doyle did little to end Holmes''s career;
several
writers, often expanding upon circumstances mentioned in the
original works, have attempted to carry on the Holmesian tradition.
The early years of the 20th century produced a number of distinguished detective novels, among them Mary Roberts Rinehart''s The Circular Staircase (1908) and G.K. Chesterton''s The Innocence of Father Brown
(1911) and other novels with the clerical detective. From 1920 on, the
names of many fictional detectives became household words: Inspector
French, introduced in Freeman Wills Crofts''s The Cask (1920); Hercule Poirot, in Agatha Christie''s The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), and Miss Marple, in Murder at the Vicarage (1930); Lord Peter Wimsey, in Dorothy L. Sayers'' Whose Body? (1923); Philo Vance, in S.S. Van Dine''s The Benson Murder Case (1926); Albert Campion, in Margery Allingham''s The Crime at Black Dudley (1929; also published as The Black Dudley Murder); and Ellery Queen, conceived by Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929).
(From left) Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet in …
© 1941 Warner Brothers, Inc.
In
a sense, the 1930s was the golden age of the detective story, with the
detectives named above continuing in new novels. The decade was also
marked by the books of Dashiell Hammett, who drew upon his own experience as a private detective to produce both stories and novels, notably The Maltese Falcon
(1930) featuring Sam Spade. In Hammett''s work, the character of the
detective became as important as the “whodunit” aspect of ratiocination
was earlier. The Thin Man
(1934), with Nick and Nora Charles, was more in the conventional vein,
with the added fillip of detection by a witty married couple.
Successors to Hammett included Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, who
also emphasized the characters of their tough but humane detectives
Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, respectively. At the end of the 1940s, Mickey Spillane
preserved the hard-boiled crime
fiction approach of Hammett and others,
but his emphasis on sex and sadism became a formula that brought him
amazing commercial success beginning with I, the Jury (1947).
The introduction of the mass-produced paperback book
in the late 1930s made detective-story writers wealthy, among them the
Americans Erle Stanley Gardner, whose criminal lawyer Perry Mason
unraveled crimes in court; Rex Stout, with his fat, orchid-raising
detective Nero Wolfe and his urbane assistant Archie Goodwin; and
Frances and Richard Lockridge, with another bright married couple, Mr.
and Mrs. North. In France, Georges Simenon produced novel after novel
at a rapid-fire pace, making his hero, Inspector Maigret, one of the
best-known detectives since Sherlock Holmes. Other writers who carried
out the tradition of Holmes or broke new ground included Nicholas Blake
(pseudonym of the poet C. Day-Lewis), Michael Innes, Dame Ngaio Marsh,
Josephine Tey, Carter Dickson (John Dickson Carr), and P.D. James.
After 1945, writers such as John le Carré adapted the detective-story
format to the spy novel, in which he addressed the mysteries and
character of the Cold War.
The Mystery
Writers of America, a professional organization founded in 1945 to
elevate the standards of mystery writing, including the detective
story, has exerted an important influence through its annual Edgar
Allan Poe Awards for excellence. See also mystery story; hard-boiled fiction.
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