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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]
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 ...
Crime fiction has multiple sub-genres, [2] including detective fiction (such as the whodunit), courtroom drama, hard-boiled fiction, and legal thrillers. Most crime drama focuses on crime investigation and does not feature the court room. Suspense and mystery are key elements that are nearly ubiquitous to the genre.
By contrast, the same author's Parker stories (published under the name Richard Stark) are grimly straightforward accounts of mundane crime—the criminal equivalent of the police procedural. Others, such as Lawrence Block 's Bernie Rhodenbarr novels, feature a role reversal, an honest criminal and crooked cop, and the use of burglar Rhodenbarr ...
The Leavenworth Case is a significant work of nineteenth-century American detective fiction. The publication and subsequent success of Green's text marked the entry of a female author into the predominantly male literary genre. [10] In addition to the conventions of detective fiction, Green's novel has some aspects of sentimental literature. [11]
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.
Weird menace is a subgenre of horror fiction and detective fiction that was popular in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and early 1940s. The weird menace pulps, also known as shudder pulps , generally featured stories in which the hero was pitted against sadistic villains, with graphic scenes of torture and brutality.