Analysis / Mystery Fiction

A short history of Mystery Fiction

• Unknown: One Thousand and One Nights has a story called The Three Apples. Interestingly, in contrast to modern works, the detective in this story has no interest in solving crimes but instead was forced to under threat of death penalty.
• 1841: Edgar Allan Poe publishes the first modern detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", with the prototypical detective, C. Auguste Dupin.
• 1853: Charles Dickens' Bleak House becomes the first full-length novel to feature a police detective (Inspector Bucket) solving a crime as a major plot point. (Of course, this being Dickens, there are tons of characters and the detective plot is only one thread of many.)
• 1866: Emile Gaboriau publishes L'Affaire Lerouge (The Widow Lerouge), the first in his Monsieur Lecoq detective series, the successor to Dupin.
• 1868: Wilkie Collins, already well known for his book The Woman in White, publishes The Moonstone, the first English detective novel (Poe's being short stories).
• 1887: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publishes A Study in Scarlet (46 years after Poe), which provides the world with Sherlock Holmes. In that story, he includes a Take That! against Dupin and Lecoq.
• 1910: Starting with the short story "The Blue Cross," G. K. Chesterton introduces the widely influential Father Brown.
• 1912: R. Austin Freeman invents the Reverse Who Dunnit with the stories in his collection The Singing Bone, featuring Dr. Thorndyke.
• 1920: Agatha Christie publishes The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the first with her detective Hercule Poirot.
• 1923: Starting with Whose Body?, Dorothy L. Sayers gleefully lampshades the mystery genre so far with her Lord Peter Wimsey series.
• 1927: Edward Stratemeyer (under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon) introduces the world to The Hardy Boys, probably the first Kid Detectives, in The Tower Treasure.
• 1929: Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, under the collective pseudonym of their hero, publish The Roman Hat Mystery, the first appearance of Ellery Queen.
• 1930:
  • Stratemeyer and writer Mildred Wirt (under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene) introduce the world to Nancy Drew in The Secret of the Old Clock.
  • Agatha Christie introduces the Little Old Lady Investigates trope with The Murder at the Vicarage and Miss Marple.
  • Dashiell Hammett writes The Maltese Falcon, the novel which introduces Sam Spade, the Trope Codifier for the Hardboiled Detective.
  • The Detection Club is formed in Britain, a society of notable Mystery Fiction authors championing the Fair-Play Whodunnit.
• 1945: The Mystery Writers of America is founded.
• 1949: Robert van Gulik translates and publishes Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, introducing traditional Chinese mystery to Western audiences.

---