Whether known as thrillers, whodunits, mysteries, crime fiction, the private eye novel, or detective fiction, the story of the sleuth doggedly bringing a criminal to justice has proven one of the most enduring, and most popular genres of fiction ever created. Although it is the largest selling genre in the United States and Western Europe, it is only recently that detective fiction has begun to be taken seriously and examined as "literature" and not just read for its entertainment value. The genre itself began in the second half of the nineteenth century in the pages of magazines and other inexpensive publications, but it was not until the twentieth that detective fiction exploded onto the British and North American markets and took a mass readership as its own. By looking at the growth in popularity of detective fiction and how it changed to accommodate shifts in public sentiment, it is easy to see why a genre in some ways so restricted in its formula can be so flexible in its wide appeal.

The public's fascination with crime and justice has sometimes been traced back as far as ancient Rome when Cicero (b. 106, BC), a Roman orator, writer, and statesman, would eloquently plead criminal cases in the public forum, and in the Roman courts and Senate. In medieval and early modern times, too, pamphlets and ballads about famous highwaymen or robbers, who were often portrayed as romantic heroes, were widely disseminated and read. However, it was not until the creation of professional detective forces in the middle of the nineteenth century that public sympathy began shifting away from the outlaw to the detectives who tracked down criminals and brought them to justice. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"(1841), by Edgar Allen Poe, featuring the sleuthing abilities of Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, is commonly regarded as the first work of detective fiction. This story, along with Poe's "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1842) and "The Purloined Letter" (1845), marked a shift from stories which focused on the shocking and supernatural to ones which focused on the workings of the criminal mind and the intellectual deduction of a crime. Other late nineteenth century works which contributed to the genre are Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1853), Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) (considered to be the first British detective novel), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), and Anna Katherine Greene's The Leavenworth Case (1878), to name just a few.

Undoubtedly the greatest fictional detective, and, indeed, the most recognised fictional character today, is Sherlock Holmes, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The popular sleuth first appeared in A Study in Scarlet (1887) and his adventures were printed both in novel and short story form until 1927, when The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes was published. Espousing deductive reasoning, logic, keen powers of observation and disguise, and an inimitable style, this 'great detective' with his loyal and appropriately-awed sidekick Dr. John Watson, solved seemingly impossible cases. Their adventures garnered increasing attention from the reading public, and phrases such as "the game is afoot" and "elementary, my dear Watson" are still instantly recognisable even today. The stories became so popular with readers that when Holmes met his death in The Final Problem (1893), public outcry was so great that Doyle, who wished to become known for writing more than 'simple' mystery stories (and who was knighted for his writings about the Boer War), had to resurrect his now famous character in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). Altogether, Holmes and Watson were featured in four novels and no less than fifty-six short stories, and were to become the standard by which future detectives were judged.

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Although Doyle wrote Sherlock Holmes stories well into the twentieth century, his characters still remain very much a part of the Victorian London of the late nineteenth century: fog-bound, gas-lit, and cobblestoned. The twentieth century was to witness innovative changes to the character of the detective and the form of the mystery story. One of the most popular detective fiction writers of the early twentieth century was G. K. Chesterton, who used the mystery as a morality tale and whose character, Father Brown, solves crime in order to save souls. Chesterton was more interested in the moral issues behind an action than in the process of detection itself, and used the mystery format in order to explore the mystery of humankind's relationship to God. The collection of stories featuring the Roman Catholic priest, The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), was hugely popular, and Chesterton published four more volumes of Father Brown stories over the next twenty five years.

The years following the end of World War One marked even greater changes to the course of the mystery genre, both in Western Europe and North America, with very different results. In Britain, the detective fiction of the years following the end of the war seemed to be a deliberate attempt by writers to return to 'the good old days' where everyone knew their place in the class structure and everyone worked harmoniously within that structure. The church was viewed as the cornerstone of British society, an ideal that is often present, however subtly, in much of the detective fiction of the period. Frequently, the detectives presented in the pages of fiction were heroic young upperclass gentlemen who solved crimes simply for the adventure and intrigue. Lord Peter Wimsey, the detective created by Dorothy L. Sayers, is a perfect example of this type of sleuth. Accompanied by Bunter, his faithful and distinctly lower-class sidekick, Wimsey approaches the solving of crime as a lark, with a witty retort or two thrown in to emphasise his superiority over the criminals he faces. Wimsey and Bunter are themselves veterans of the war, and the loyalties fostered by the experience bind the two together even more strongly than class would divide them.

The 1920s in Britain ushered in what has become known as the 'Golden Age' of detective fiction, a term, which today can refer to either the period itself (between the two world wars), or the distinctive type of literature produced. Known as the 'cosy' detective story, the fictional crimes very often took place within a 'closed' environment of an English country house or other secluded environment, a context that became a favourite with writers of the time. The crimes committed are often presented as a type of intellectual puzzle, in which a precise chronology, a limited number of suspects, and an isolated setting are vital in the solving of the crime. Usually, all the characters introduced have motives for the crime so all come under scrutiny by the detective. Suspicion shifts from one character to another until the real culprit (usually the least suspected) is revealed and the puzzle solved. The preoccupation with allowing the reader the potential to solve the crime before detective reveals the solution became an important concern with the many writers who used the style. Dorothy L. Sayers treated the issue with a tongue-in-cheek "Rules of Fair Play" for mystery writers, but many writers took the obligation to their readers seriously. Agatha Christie, who published her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920, used this format repeatedly and successfully throughout her long writing career. Although her two best known detectives, the Belgian Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, do not conform to the image of the dapper English gentleman detective, Christie's voluminous output (90 novels) and distinctive style have come to epitomise the 'cosy' style of detective fiction. Christie used the country-house setting in much of her fiction, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which is one of her most famous stories, The Sittaford Mystery (1931), and Peril at End House (1932), and her culprits include everyone from the detective's right hand man to the supposed murder "victim".

Detective fiction took a markedly different turn in North America after World War One. Although certain authors (such as the writing duo known as 'Ellery Queen') managed to successfully transplant the country house format onto North American soil, others took the detective story and gave it a distinctive American flavour. Unlike British writers, who focused on reviving the 'good old days', the detective fiction of North America reflected a growing cynicism, gritty realism, a distrust of authority, and an awareness of the increasing influence of the gangs that sprang up alongside Prohibition. At the forefront of this shift was the pulp magazine The Black Mask, founded by Henry L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Published from 1920 to 1951, the inexpensive weekly magazine quickly found its niche with what became known as 'hard-boiled' detective fiction. Terry Mack, the first 'hard-boiled' detective, appeared in Carroll John Daly's story "Three Gun Terry" in May 1923. Dashiell Hammett's "Arson Plus" also appeared that year, the first story featuring the 'Continental Op'. In 1926 the magazine was taken over by Captain Joseph T. Shaw, who shortened the publication's title to Black Mask and worked to establish his pulp as "the only magazine of its kind in the ...world." Concentrating on realism, simplicity, and plausibility, Shaw recognised Dashiell Hammett as "the leader in the thought that finally brought the magazine its distinctive form...". Hammett, who had himself been a detective for Pinkerton's Detective Agency before he turned to writing, is perhaps best known for his detective Sam Spade, who appeared in The Maltese Falcon in 1930 (immortalised by Humphrey Bogart in the 1941 film of the same title). Since the publication used pulpwood paper, which was cheaper to mail than the dime novel, more people could afford to purchase the magazine and, indeed, the advent of the pulp press in general rapidly eclipsed the earlier dime publications.

North American 'hard-boiled' detective fiction was usually set in large cities, the 'new Wild West' as it became known, and the heroes of the many stories were generally loners who shunned romantic entanglements (although they usually wouldn't hesitate to help a lady in trouble). These 'tough guys' occupied a morally ambiguous field somewhere between the police and the criminals and operated according to their own standards of ethics and justice. As Daly's most popular detective, Race Williams commented, "[m]y ethics are my own. I'm not saying they're good and I'm not admitting they're bad, and what's more I'm not interested in the opinions of others on the subject." The private eyes of this kind became so popular that the very name 'Race Williams' on the cover of a magazine was enough to boost the issue's circulation by up to twenty percent. In breaking away from the tradition of genteel and detached detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, writers such as Raymond Chandler (who created the popular detective Philip Marlowe), Dasheill Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardener (creator of the hugely popular lawyer Perry Mason), Chester Himes, and Raoul Whitfield created detectives who were not afraid to shoot first and ask questions later.

"I squeezed lead - and the show was over. No hero holding his chest and giving a last message to his surviving countrymen. He was dead five times before he hit the floor."

These stories were also unique in that they used slang phrases and colourful metaphors to capture the realistic atmosphere of the 1920s and '30s urban environments in which their detectives lived and worked. Today, a phrase such as "you dumb mug, get your mitts off the marbles before I stuff that mud-pipe down your mush - and tell your moll to hand over the mazuma." are anachronistic and largely indecipherable, however the realism of the stories was immensely popular with contemporary audiences.

Glossary of hard-boiled slang

List of hard-boiled fiction links

Black Mask writers were, as some contemporaries suggested, several years ahead of their time. Indeed, the magazine faced no real competition in the 'hard-boiled' detective genre until the 1930s. Although in any given month there could be up to 200 other pulp magazines for sale to the reading public, Black Mask was, for a time, unique in the type of stories it published. Magazines like Detective Fiction Weekly and Detective Story, which were published in the '20s did not typically run the kind of tough guy fiction featured in Black Mask. In 1932 Dime Detective appeared which, like Black Mask, began by publishing both private eye stories and those with titles like "The Screeching Skull" and "The Green Ghoul". By the mid '30s, however, they had switched over to mainly the types of stories found in the other magazine, helped in part by the transference of some of the writers from Black Mask to Dime Detective. Cashing in on the popularity of the style, almost all the detective pulps of the 1930s eventually began featuring considerable 'hard-boiled' material in their magazines, suggesting that the tastes of the masses could indeed influence the course of popular fiction.

After World War Two, the public's attitude toward the 'hard-boiled' detective, and the pulp magazines themselves, cooled for a number of reasons. Readers had become distrustful of the often formulaic style of the 'hard-boiled' detective story, and colourful comic books were slowly infiltrating the niche once held by the pulp magazines. Also influencing readers' tastes was the popular television show "Dragnet", which began in 1951 and ran intermittently until 1970. The popularity of the drama, which featured careful police work and the interweaving of policemen's professional and personal lives, was reflected in the detective fiction produced in the '50s and '60s. Black Mask had ceased production by 1951, but the detective story proved more resilient than its pulp medium, and the focus shifted from the gritty, independent private eye to the 'police procedural' style that emphasised adherence to the law and the importance of teamwork in the solving of crime. Some of the first police procedural novels were Lawrence Treat's V as in Victim (1945), Last Seen Wearing (1952) by Hillary Waugh, and Gideon's Day (1955) by John Creasey. One of the most prolific writers of the police procedural style of detective story is Ed McBain (born Salvatore A. Lombino), who in 1956 published his first novel of the now famous '87th precinct' (Cop Hater) and has continued to write popular novels right up to the present day. His characters, Meyer Meyer, Steve Carella, Andy Parker, and others, are a team of investigators working together to solve various crimes, and they must rely on each other's various strengths and talents to unearth the solutions. Set in the big city, the police characters and cases are portrayed as realistically as possible, and different characters take the fore in different novels, adding to their familiarity and, thus, their popularity for the reader. The appeal of this type of setting and interaction is obvious in the plethora of police television shows that are based on the concept, from Dragnet to such later shows as Hill Street Blues, Law and Order and NYPD Blue.

More recently, mystery writers have chosen to take existing styles of detective fiction and update them to suit their own thematic or regional interests, resulting in hundreds of variations on older styles. The use of the country house style has been updated in the works of authors like P.D. James who has set mysteries in forensic laboratories and hospitals for the terminally ill. She has also closely examined the role of the female private eye in such works as An Unsuitable Job For A Woman (1977). Other writers have focused on particular cultures or regions, with great success. Tony Hillerman, for example, successfully adapted the detective story to the Navajo reservation in the southwestern United States. His novels (the first, The Blessing Way, appeared in 1970) weave the detective story around the landscape, beliefs, and rituals of the Navajo people and Hillerman has won the Navajo Tribe's Special Friend Award for accurately portraying the culture. Hillerman has written over thirteen mystery novels featuring his detective duo and the continued popularity of his works is evident. Giving the detective story a regional slant, Canadian author L.R. Wright's works of detective fiction are set near Vancouver and many feature the sleuthing abilities of R.C.M.P officer Karl Alberg. Like the stories of Father Brown, the focus is not so much on the crime itself but on the motives behind the crime, however for this author the process of detection is also important.

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Diverse Detectives

As the detective story has broadened to encompass diverse settings and regions, so too have the detectives branched out to reflect the diversity of the mass reading public. The woman detective has become increasingly popular in fiction, and African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic, Jewish, Native, gay, lesbian, and disabled detectives are all becoming more well represented in the pages of the genre. The shift away from any one particular style of detective fiction to individual renderings of specific elements, themes, regions, or ethnic groups reveals that both readers and writers want to explore elements of the detective story and make them unique. The diversity in the modern detective fiction genre would suggest that there is a demand for a mystery story that appeals at a more personal level, where the reader can identify with the protagonist not only because he or she represents the forces of good, but because he or she is distinctly human in his or her diversity. Unlike the 'hard-boiled' private eye, whose cynicism and isolation made him the figure of the lone vigilante in the fight of good against evil, the modern detective, although faced with often horrific crimes, has increasingly diverse talents and viewpoints from which to view and solve them. They may not be as infallible as Sherlock Holmes but the detectives of today are, perhaps, more accessible in their realism and fallibility, and may offer the modern reader the hope that each of us has the power to fight the forces of darkness.

modern crime writing in the UK

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