mystery: History

History

Although some critics trace the origins of the genre to such disparate works as Aesop's fables, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the Apocrypha, most agree that the Western mystery, complete with all its conventions, emerged in 1841 with the publication of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” This and all of Poe's “tales of ratiocination” feature the chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, a brilliant amateur detective, who, by a keen analysis of motives and clues, solves crimes that are baffling to the police.

The first full-length mystery novels were probably Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), which continued Poe's concept of the brilliant detective—although Collins's rose-growing Sergeant Cuff is a policeman—and added an emphasis on the sleuth's idiosyncrasies. Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) is a detective novel that is both intriguing and frustrating because, since the novel is unfinished, its crime is never solved. In 1887 Arthur Conan Doyle published “A Study in Scarlet,” which introduced Sherlock Holmes, destined to become the most famous of all literary detectives. This vain and aloof amateur sleuth, with a fondness for pipes, violins, and cocaine, solves crimes through extraordinarily perceptive recognition and interpretation of evidence.

Like Conan Doyle, subsequent mystery writers often featured the same detective in several works. Especially popular have been G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, E. D. Biggers's Charlie Chan, S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret, Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, Leslie Charteris's “The Saint,” Robert van Gulick's Magistrate Dee, Harry Kemelman's Rabbi David Small, Emma Lathan's John Putnam Thatcher, Ellery Queen in the works of Frederic Dannay and M. B. Lee, P. D. James's Adam Dalgleish, Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins, Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse, and the various Washington, D.C. private eyes (private investigators) in the novels of George Pelecanos.

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