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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]
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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.
The "whodunit" flourished during the so-called "Golden Age" of detective fiction, between the First and Second World Wars, [13] when it was the predominant mode of crime writing. Many of the best-known writers of whodunits in this period were British — notably Agatha Christie , Nicholas Blake , G. K. Chesterton , Christianna Brand , Edmund ...
Hardboiled (or hard-boiled) fiction is a literary genre that shares some of its characters and settings with crime fiction (especially detective fiction and noir fiction).The genre's typical protagonist is a detective who battles the violence of organized crime that flourished during Prohibition (1920–1933) and its aftermath, while dealing with a legal system that has become as corrupt as ...
The gentleman detective is a type of fictional character. He (or she) has long been a staple of crime fiction, particularly in detective novels and short stories set in the United Kingdom in the Golden Age. While not necessarily aristocracy, the heroes of these adventures are often members of the British gentry or gentlemen by conduct.