20th Century Literature

#DETECTIVE FICTIONS

*DEFINITION OF DETECTIVE FICTION :

                             Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective-either professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder.

                           Detective story, type of popular literature in which a crime is introduced and investigated and the culprit is revealed.



                           The traditional elements of the detective story are: (1) the seemingly perfect crime; (2) the wrongly accused suspect at whom circumstantial evidence points; (3) the bungling of dim-witted police; (4) the greater powers of observation and superior mind of the detective; and (5) the startling and unexpected denouement, in which the detective reveals how the identity of the culprit was ascertained.

                         Detective stories frequently operate on the principle that superficially convincing evidence is ultimately irrelevant. Usually it is also axiomatic that the clues from which a logical solution to the problem can be reached be fairly presented to the reader at exactly the same time that the sleuth receives them and that the sleuth deduce the solution to the puzzle from a logical interpretation of these clues.

                         The first detective story was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue"by Edgar Allan Poe, published in April 1841. The profession of detective had come into being only a few decades earlier, and Poe is generally thought to have been influenced by the Mémoires (1828–29) of Francois-Eugene Vidocq, who in 1817 founded the world’s first detective bureau, in Paris. Poe’s fictional French detective, C.Auguste Dupin,  appeared in two other stories, “The Mystery of marie Roget" (1845) and “The Purloined Letter" (1845). The detective story soon expanded to novel length.

The French author Emile Gaboriau's L’Affaire Lerouge (1866) was an enormously successful novel that had several sequels. Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) remains one of the finest English detective novels. Anna Katharine Green became one of the first American detective novelists with The Leavenworth Case (1878). The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) by the Australian Fergus Hume was a phenomenal commercial success.

                         The greatest of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes, along with his loyal, somewhat obtuse companion Dr.Watson, made his first appearance in Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Conan Doyle's novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) and continued into the 20th century in such collections of stories as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894) and the longer Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). So great was the appeal of Sherlock Holmes’s detecting style that the death of Conan Doyle did little to end Holmes’s career; several writers, often expanding upon circumstances mentioned in the original works, have attempted to carry on the Holmesian tradition.

                        The early years of the 20th century produced a number of distinguished detective novels, among them Mary Roberts Rinehart'sThe Circular Staircase (1908) and G.K. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) and other novels with the clerical detective.From 1920 on, the names of many fictional detectives became household words: Inspector French, introduced in Freeman Wills Crofts'sThe Cask (1920); Hercule Poirot, in Agatha Christir’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), and Miss Marple, in in S.s.Van Dine's The Benson Murder Case (1926); Albert Campion, in Margery Allingham's The Crime at Black Dudley (1929; also published as The Black Dudley Murder); and Ellery Queen, conceived by Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929).

                             The detective genre began around the same time as speculative fiction and other genre fiction in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained extremely popular, particularly in novels.Some of the most famous heroes of detective fiction include C.Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Hercule Poirot.Juvenile stories featuring The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and The Boxcar Children have also remained in print for several decades.


                         Detective fiction is one of the most popular literary genres, and has been for centuries, but where did the genre come from? Why did mystery, suspense, and crime fiction become such a huge part of literature and popular culture? And how has the detective genre changed in the past 200+ years?

                     Detective fiction can be traced back to the 1800s, around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Before this time, most people lived in smaller towns and worked and socialized in closer circles, so people knew everyone they came into contact with for the most part. But with the rise of industrial jobs, more people began moving to cities, which lead to interacting with more strangers on a daily basis, a heightened sense of suspicion and uncertainty, and yes, more crime. It was around this time too where police forces were first established. 


                             London’s police force came to be in 1829, and New York City got its police force in 1845. With more people living in cities and crime rates on the rise, the setting was right for detective genres to flourish.

                              The first modern detective story is often thought to be Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, a short story
published in 1841 that introduced the world to private detective Monsieur C.Auguste Dupin.In fact, detective fiction was so new when Dupin entered the literary world that the word “detective” hadn’t even been used in English before.

                                    The first detective novel followed soon after with British author Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The story was first serialized in Charles Dickens’s journal All the Year RoundAnd in 1868, it was released as a complete novel. This novel is significant not just because it’s the first detective novel, but also because it established many of the classic tropes and attributes of the detective novel.



                          The Moonstone's detective character Sergeant Cuff was based on the real-life detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher, one of the first ever detectives of Scotland Yard.

                                The detective character who really shaped the way we see literary detectives to this day, however, is probably someone you’ve guessed already: Sherlock Holmes.Not only is he the most famous detective character to ever be written, Sherlock Holmes is one of the most popular characters in fiction ever. Holmes was inspired in part on Poe’s detective Dupinbut he was also based on a real man: Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell was a surgeon and lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle met Dr. Bell in 1877, and Doyle has said he modeled Holmes’s quick wit and intelligence off of Bell. The first Sherlock Holmes novel, A study in scarlet came out in 1887, and Doyle continued to write Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories until around 1927.

                           1920 to 1939 came to be known as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. And the queen of his age was Agatha Christie. During her lifetime, Agatha Christie wrote sixty-six detective novels and fourteen short story collections. Her novel And Then There Were None remains one of the best-selling books of all time, and as of 2018, the Guinness World Records listed Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time. Christie is responsible for creating not one but two of the most famous detectives in literary history: Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.These detective characters remain highly influential to contemporary crime fiction writers.

                             who in “The Waste Land” wrote of the fractured modern world as a “heap of broken images,” it seems possible that Golden Age detective stories offered above all a pleasing orderliness—a way of seeing ghastly disruptions restored to equilibrium with the soothing predictability of ritual.Christi and other authors from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction have created a legacy of detective novels based on gathering clues and solving crimes as if they were puzzles the reader can solve with the detective. In contemporary literature, this style has evolved into what we now call cozy mysteries.


                              In response to the Golden Age authors, some American writers began to examine and reconsider the formula for detective fiction. Many people started to think of puzzle-solving crime fiction as too unrealistic and too clean. These authors and their readers were looking for crime novels that were more based in reality and the way real crimes happen. And so the hardboiled detective genre was born. 

                                  These stories included detectives that were dealing with corrupt cops and organized crime. Hardboiled crime novels create a world where it’s every man for himself, and the detective can trust no one.

                                       While hardboiled detective fiction emerged as early as the 1920s, the detective genre really took off in America in the 1930s-1950s. One of the most popular hardboiled detective novels from this period is Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleepthe novel that introduced readers to the detective Philip Marlowe. This character would go on to feature in many of Chandler’s short stories and novels. And you’ll find many film adaptations featuring this hardboiled detective as well.

                              That leads us to where we are today with fictional detectives in contemporary crime fiction. Now, mystery and suspense fiction is more popular than ever. What that means is that there is room for many types of detective genres answering to readers’ specific tastes and interests. If you’re looking for supernatural detective stories, they’re out there. If you enjoy the realism and grittiness of the hardboiled detective genre, it’s still out there.

                                   If you want to revisit familiar and beloved detective characters, there are plenty of newer adaptations of classic detectives. For instance, give Sherry Thomas's  Lady Sherlock series a try. It really is a great time to be a mystery reader.

What Makes Great Detective Fiction, According to T. S. Eliot

                         Well before detective stories came into literary vogue, T. S. Eliot had become one of the genre’s most passionate and discerning readers.


                                In 1944 the literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote an exasperated essay in the pages of

 The New Yorker titled “Why Do People Read Detective Stories? " 

                                Wilson, who at the time was about to go abroad to cover the Allied bombing campaign on Germany, felt that he’d outgrown the detective genre by the age of twelve, by which time he’d read through the stories of the early masters, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Yet everyone he knew seemed to be addicted. His wife at the time, Mary McCarthy, was in the habit of recommending her favorite detective novels to their émigré pal Vladimir Nabokov; she lent him H. F. Heard’s beekeeper whodunit “A Taste for Honey,” which the Russian author enjoyed while recovering from dental surgery. (After reading Wilson’s essay, Nabokov advised his friend not to dismiss the genre tout court until he’d tried some Dorothy L. Sayers.)

                                  Surrounded on all sides by detection connoisseurs, Wilson sounded genuinely perplexed when he wondered, “What, then, is the spell of the detective story that has been felt by T. S. Eliot and Paul Elmer More but which I seem to be unable to feel?”

                             That T.S.Eliot,  of all people, was a devoted fan of the genre must have rankled Wilson in particular. Eliot, the author of famously difficult and formidably learned poems, whose every critical pronouncement was seized upon by dons and converted into doctrine, was an unimpeachable authority in matters of literary judgment.

                        Wilson, indeed, had played a part in establishing Eliot’s reputation as such, having gushed, in his era-defining study “Axel’s Castle” (1931), that the poet-critic had an “infinitely sensitive apparatus for aesthetic appreciation”—a sensitivity presumably not worth squandering on something as puerile and formulaic as mysteries.

                        But, as scholars like David Chinitz have pointed out, Eliot’s attitude toward popular art forms was more capacious and ambivalent than he’s often given credit for. His most formally ambitious poetry retained something of the jumpy syncopations of the ragtime he’d heard growing up in St. Louis; in his later years he wanted nothing more than to have a hit on Broadway. And it so happens that, well before detective stories came into vogue among Wilson’s cohort, Eliot had become one of the genre’s most passionate and discerning readers. 

                        Among the many treasures to be found in the third volume of “The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot,” which is now out from Johns Hopkins University Press, are a number of reviews of detective novels which Eliot published, with no byline, in his literary journal The Criterion, in 1927

                              In them, we see not only Eliot’s passion for detective fiction but his attempts to codify the genre in the midst of some of its most momentous evolutions.

                                 At the end of his 1944 essay, Edmund Wilson suggested that it was no accident that the Golden Age of detection coincided with the period between the two World Wars: in a shattered civilization, there was something reassuring about the detective’s ability to link up all the broken fragments and “know just where to fix the guilt.” Such tidy solutions were to Wilson the mark of glib and simplistic genre fiction. But to Eliot, who in “The Waste Land” wrote of the fractured modern world as a “heap of broken images,” it seems possible that Golden Age detective stories offered above all a pleasing orderliness—a way of seeing ghastly disruptions restored to equilibrium with the soothing predictability of ritual.

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