II.

Earliest Detective Stories

The originator of this early type was the American short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe, creator of the world’s first fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin’s methods of deduction and his eccentric personal habits provided the model that most detective-story writers have followed since. Dupin made his bow in April 1841, when Graham’s Magazine published Poe’s classic horror story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. The detective appeared thereafter in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842-1843) and “The Purloined Letter” (1845). The French setting of these stories is partly inspired by the 1828 memoirs of the first real-life detective, François Eugène Vidocq, chef de la Sûreté (head of the Criminal Investigation Department) in Paris. In turn, Vidocq and Poe both influenced the French writer Émile Gaboriau, whose two detectives, the amateur Tabaret and policeman Lecoq, feature in the first-ever series of detective novels, starting with L’Affaire Lerouge (1863).

Across the Channel, The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins, featuring the brilliant if not wholly successful Sergeant Cuff, was the first full-length English detective novel, although detective elements had appeared in such “sensation novels” as his earlier The Woman in White (1860) and Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and can be traced back to the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s. Charles Dickens had included a sympathetic detective in Bleak House (1853) and seemed poised to become a full-blown detective novelist with The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), although he died before completing it, leaving the identity of his murderer unknown. In 1878 Anna Katherine Green’s The Leavenworth Case inaugurated the American detective novel.