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Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—whether professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as speculative fiction and other genre fiction in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained extremely ...
Sherlock Holmes (foreground) oversees the arrest of a criminal; this hero of crime fiction popularized the genre.. Crime fiction, detective story, murder mystery, mystery novel, and police novel are terms used to describe narratives that centre on criminal acts and especially on the investigation, either by an amateur or a professional detective, of a crime, often a murder. [1]
Poe created the Dupin character before the word detective had been coined. The character laid the groundwork for fictional detectives to come, including Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and many others. Dupin also established most of the common elements of the detective fiction genre.
A common subgenre of detective fiction is the Whodunit. Whodunits experienced an increase in popularity during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction of the 1920s-1940s, when it was the primary style of detective fiction. This subgenre is classified as a detective story where the reader is given clues throughout as to who the culprit is, giving ...
The closed circle of suspects is a common element of detective fiction, and the subgenre that employs it can be referred to as the closed circle mystery. [1] [2] [3] Less precisely, this subgenre – works with the closed circle literary device – is simply known as the "classic", "traditional" or "cozy" detective fiction. [4] [5]
Crime Fiction came to be recognised as a distinct literary genre, with specialist writers and a devoted readership, in the 19th century.Earlier novels and stories were typically devoid of systematic attempts at detection: There was a detective, whether amateur or professional, trying to figure out how and by whom a particular crime was committed; there were no police trying to solve a case ...
John Colin Watson (1 February 1920 – 18 January 1983) was a British writer of detective fiction and the creator of characters such as Inspector Purbright and Lucilla Teatime. Born in Croydon , Surrey, he is best remembered for the twelve Flaxborough novels, typified by their comic and dry wit and set in a fictional small town in England which ...
The Golden Age of Detective Fiction was an era of classic murder mystery novels of similar patterns and styles, predominantly in the 1920s and 1930s. The Golden Age proper is in practice usually taken to refer to a type of fiction which was predominant in the 1920s and 1930s but had been written since at least 1911 and is still being written.