Description
Sherlock Holmes is now a seminal figure in detective fiction, but he was preceded by Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin and Émile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq, who laid the groundwork for deductive reasoning in the genre. Arthur Conan Doyle, in “A Study in Scarlet,” acknowledged his predecessors, including Poe. The origins of the full-length detective novel are disputed, with contenders including works by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and the anonymously penned “The Notting Hill Mystery.” As detective fiction evolved into the hard-boiled and cozy sub-genres in America and Britain respectively, the foundational intelligence and analytical clarity introduced by earlier works remained essential, shaping the characteristics of detectives to follow.
