A Brief Outline of Mystery Fiction History

Recommended Reference Books

A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page

This is a brief outline of Classic Mystery Fiction. It contains a historical survey, and some highlighted classics you might want to read. There are links to articles in the web site, which contain much longer reading lists, and detailed commentary on the writers. This list is just to get you started.

1) Mystery Fiction in English began around 1790. Most early examples are little read. In the 1830's, the first great group of American writers emerged. These writers are known as the American Renaissance, and many of them wrote mysteries, as well as other kinds of fiction, such as science fiction, adventure stories, sea stories, and realistic novels. These are the earliest mysteries still much read today. Key Works:

Edgar Allan Poe: Tales
Herman Melville: Benito Cereno

2) In the 1850's and 1860's in Britain, authors started writing remarkable if melodramatic thrillers, known as Sensation novels. The best is:

Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White

This is a gripping tale of a naive young woman menaced by a conspiracy, aided only by her gutsy half sister.

3) Other British and French writers the 1850's and 1860's started writing fairly realistic stories about the police hunting criminals. These are ancestors of today's detective fiction. See the articles on casebook fiction, and Emile Gaboriau. These policemen often made clever deductions based on physical evidence at crime scenes. They were also skilled at tracking criminals, and at disguise.

4) In America in 1878 Anna Katherine Green began writing novels filled with skilled detective work, in which the heroes uncover hidden facts about the past and the characters related to the crime. Her techniques are still being imitated today.

Anna Katherine Green: The Circular Study

4) Late in the 1800's the best writer of mystery stories up till that time emerged. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the great detective, and starred him in a series of short stories. The very best are collected in two volumes:

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

5) Doyle's popularity spurred an explosion in mystery publishing, especially short stories. Some good collections of these turn of the century stories:

Hugh Greene, editor: The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Hugh Greene, editor: Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Hugh Greene, editor: The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Michael Cox, editor: Victorian Detective Stories (1992)
Marie Smith, editor: The Mammoth Book of Golden Age Detective Stories (1994)
Arthur Morrison: Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories

6) Some writers emphasized detectives who used science. Examples:

Arthur B. Reeve: The Silent Bullet

The brilliant storyteller Mary Roberts Rinehart has some affinities with this group.

Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Man in Lower Ten
Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Bat
Mary Roberts Rinehart: Miss Pinkerton

So does the extravagant Cleveland S. Moffett, who wrote a long complex mystery novel set in a romantic's Paris:

Cleveland S. Moffett: Through the Wall
Donald McGibney: 32 Caliber

Rinehart had a large group of followers:

Dorothy Cameron Disney: Strawstack Murders

7) Others wrote stories of clever crooks, known as rogues, often men who stole jewels from the rich.

Arnold Bennett: The Grand Babylon Hotel

8) Many mystery writers wrote about Impossible Crimes. These are crimes which do not seem to have any rational explanation. The most popular kind is The Locked Room: a corpse is found inside a room that is locked from the inside. How was it possible for the murderer to kill his victim, then escape from the room, which is completely locked from the inside? At the end of the tale, the detective will explain how this was done. Other stories deal with killers who apparently flew through the air, or walked through walls, or read minds. Eventually their crimes are given logical, realistic explanations. Some important early examples:

Israel Zangwill: The Big Bow Mystery
Jacques Futrelle: The Best Thinking Machine Detective Stories
G.K. Chesterton: The Innocence of Father Brown
G.K. Chesterton: The Incredulity of Father Brown

The collections by Futrelle and Chesterton above mix Impossible Crimes with other kinds of mysteries, all equally puzzling.

9) The period from 1920-1945 is known as the Golden Age of mystery fiction. Many different kinds of books were published then. One major group includes writers whose detectives solved mysteries through pure thinking. These writers are known as "intuitionists". Their mystery plots tend to be extremely clever puzzles, with tricky, surprising solutions. Their books are really fun to read. They include the greatest mystery writer of all time, Agatha Christie.

Agatha Christie: The Tuesday Night Club Murders
Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None

The intuitionists revered Chesterton and the other impossible crime writers. One of the intuitionists, John Dickson Carr, specialized in impossible crimes, and became the all time best writer of them:

John Dickson Carr: The Three Coffins
John Dickson Carr: The Judas Window

Some later writers dealt with impossible crimes:

Hake Talbot: The Rim of the Pit
Bill Pronzini: Casefile

The popular, highly literate, American author S. S. Van Dine created his own school of intuitionists:

S. S. Van Dine: The Kidnap Murder Case
Anthony Abbot: About the Murder of Geraldine Foster
Rex Stout: Some Buried Caesar
Craig Rice and Stuart Palmer: People Vs. Withers and Malone

Van Dine's greatest follower, and 20th Century America's greatest mystery writer, was Ellery Queen. His stories feature highly complex plots, bizarre events, and mysteries solved through clever chains of reasoning.

Ellery Queen: The Siamese Twin Mystery
Ellery Queen: The Tragedy of Z

Several science fiction writers mixed their field with the mystery story. They usually emphasized the intuitionist approach:

Isaac Asimov: The Caves of Steel
Isaac Asimov: The Foundation Trilogy
Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
Anthony Boucher: Exeuent Murderers

Some other gems of the intuitionist school (as you can tell by this point, the school is a favorite of mine):

A.A. Milne: The Red House Mystery
Ngaio Marsh: False Scent

This sort of fiction is still being written today:

William L. DeAndrea: Killed in the Ratings
K.K. Beck: Murder in a Mummy Case

10) Not all major mystery writers of the Golden Age were intuitionists. The Realist school emphasized careful, realistic detective work, often science based, complex alibis in their plots, and carefully detailed "backgrounds" showing some aspect of contemporary life, such as a business, medicine, or religion. The school especially flourished in Britain in the 1920's and early 1930's. Major realists include:

R. Austin Freeman: The Eye of Osiris
Freeman Wills Crofts: The Cask
Dorothy L. Sayers: Whose Body
Dorothy L. Sayers: The Nine Tailors
C.H.B. Kitchin: The Death of My Aunt

Several later American writers were influenced by the realist tradition:

Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Careless Kitten
Lawrence L. Blochman: Recipe For Homicide
Helen McCloy: The Singing Diamonds
Lenore Glen Offord: Walking Shadow

11) During the Golden Age, pulp magazines were published. These were dozens of cheap magazines filled to overflowing with short stories. Many featured tough guy (and gal) detectives whose cases mixed clever plots with adventure and excitement.

The magazine Black Mask was the first important mystery pulp. Its 1920's and early 1930's fiction was extremely tough, and is known as "hard-boiled". Its leading writers include:

Dashiell Hammett: The Big Knockover
Dashiell Hammett: The Continental Op
Erle Stanley Gardner: Dead Man's Letters
Joseph T. Shaw, editor: The Hard-Boiled Omnibus
William F. Nolan, editor: The Black Mask Boys

During the 1930's such magazines as Dime Detective featured lighter, cheerier, more escapist pulp stories. Some good anthologies:

Erle Stanley Gardner: The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith
Robert E. Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg, editors: Hard-Boiled Detectives

Several non pulp writers also combined adventure and mystery in their works. Both of these are historical novels, one set in Regency England, the other in Ancient Rome:

Georgette Heyer: The Talisman Ring
Henry Winterfeld: Detectives in Togas

Hard-boiled fiction is still being written today:

Earl W. Emerson: Black Hearts and Slow Dancing
Stephen Paul Cohen: Island of Steel

12) Some pulps featured sinister atmosphere and impossible crimes:

Cornell Woolrich: Nightwebs
Cornell Woolrich: Blind Date With Death
Douglas G. Greene and Robert Adey, editors: Death Locked In
Robert E. Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg, editors: Tough Guys and Dangerous Dames

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