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Detective Stories: type of popular literature in which a crime is introduced and investigated and the culprit is revealed.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 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).In a sense, the 1930s was the golden age of the detective story, with the detectives named above continuing in new novels. (...)Read all the Article at the Encyclopædia Britannica - the Online Encyclopedia
