Detective fiction

Detective fiction is the fictional genre centered around an investigation by a detective, usually in the form of the investigation of a murder.

A common feature is that the investigator is usually unmarried, with some source of income other than a regular job, and frequently has an assistant, who is asked to make all kinds of apparently irrelevant inquiries, and acts as an audience for the explanation of the mystery at the end of the story.

A subgenre of the detective novel is the whodunnit, where great ingenuity is usually exercised in revealing the basic method of the murder in such a manner as to simultaneously conceal it from the readers, until the end of the book, when the method and culprit are revealed.

An early archetype of these types of story were the three Auguste Dupin stories of Edgar Allan Poe: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, and The Mystery of Marie Roget. This last is particularly interesting, as it is a scarcely fictionalized analysis of the circumstances around the real-life discovery of the body of a young woman named Mary Rogers, in which Poe expounds his theory of what actually happened. The style of the analysis, with its attention to forensic detail, makes it a precursor of that most famous of all fictional detectives, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who set the style for many, many others in later years, including pastiches such as August Derleth's Solar Pons.

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) wrote the first great mystery novel The Woman in White. He is sometimes referred to as the 'grandfather of English detective fiction'. His novel The Moonstone was descibed by T. S. Eliot as "the first and greatest of English detective novels" and by Dorothy L. Sayers as "probably the very finest detective story ever written". Although technically preceded by Charles Felix?s The Notting Hill Mystery (1865), The Moonstone can claim to have established the genre with several classic features of the twentieth-century detective story:

A country house robbery
An 'inside job'
A celebrated investigator
Bungling local constabulary
Detective enquiries
False suspects
The 'least likely suspect'
A rudimentary 'locked room' murder
A reconstruction of the crime
A final twist in the plot

The full list of fictional detectives would be immense. The format is well suited to dramatic presentation, and so there are also many television and film detectives, besides those appearing in adaptations of novels in this genre. Fictional detectives generally fall within one of four domains:

the amateur or dilettante detective (Holmes);
the private investigator (Marlowe, Spade, Rockford);
the police detective (Ironside, Kojak, Morse);
more recently, the medical examiner, criminal psychologist, or other specialist (Scarpetta, Quincy, Cracker).

There is also a subgenre of historical detectives. See historical whodunnit for an overview.

Notable fictional detectives and their creators include:

Amateurs:

Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple - Agatha Christie

Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Simon Templar aka "The Saint" - Leslie Charteris

Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers

Nero Wolfe - Rex Stout

Kinky Friedman - Kinky Friedman

Private eyes:

Philip Marlowe - Raymond Chandler

Sam Spade - Dashiell Hammett