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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, crime novel, 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]
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 ...
Although "Oedipus's enquiry is based on supernatural, pre-rational methods that are evident in most narratives of crime until the development of Enlightenment thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries", this narrative has "all of the central characteristics and formal elements of the detective story, including a mystery surrounding a ...
Crime fiction (including crime comics) centers on a crime(s), how the criminal gets caught and serves time, and the repercussions of the crime Caper: fiction told from the point of view of the criminals rather than the investigator. Well-known writers in this genre include W. R. Burnett, John Boland, Peter O’Donnell, and Michael Crichton. [6 ...
A similar but more detailed list of prerequisites was prepared by S. S. Van Dine in an article entitled "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories", which appeared in The American Magazine in September 1928. [7] They are commonly referred to as Van Dine's Commandments. [8]
The typical caper story involves one or more crimes (especially thefts, swindles, or occasionally kidnappings) perpetrated by the main characters in full view of the reader. The actions of police or detectives attempting to prevent or solve the crimes may also be chronicled, but are not the main focus of the story.
Hardboiled writing is also associated with "noir fiction". Eddie Duggan discusses the similarities and differences between the two related forms in his 1999 article on pulp writer Cornell Woolrich. [13] In his full-length study of David Goodis, Jay Gertzman notes: "The best definition of hard boiled I know is that of critic Eddie Duggan.
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 ...