Hello readers, I'm going to talk about detective fictions of twentieth century literature. So the first question that arrives in our mind is what is detective fiction ? Which type of work is called detective fiction ? So let's go through some interesting things about detective fiction.
Definition of Detective Fiction
"Detective fiction is a genre of writing where a detective works to solve a crime. The audience is challenged to solve the crime by the clues provided before the detective reveals the answer at the end of the novel"
The detective figure, literary and real, emerged in Siam between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to bring clarity to increasingly complex social and political situations. In the beginning of the novel, a crime is introduced. Oftentimes, it seems like the perfect crime. The detective works to gather clues and may, at times, seem like he or she is making mistakes or may even seem inept. In some novels, the wrong person is accused based on just a little evidence. Eventually, the detective begins to piece together the crime and, usually because of some unexpected event, the detective solves the crime and finds the guilty culprit.
◆History of Detective Fiction
The first detective story is credited to Edgar Allan Poe and his short story "The Murders in Rue Morgue" written in 1841.
In this story, two women are murdered, and the police have a hard time solving the case. Detective Dupin leads his own investigation and solves the crime when the police cannot. Poe continued to use Detective Dupin in several other short stories.
Here is one video about Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
The genre grew somewhat popular throughout the 1800s. Victorian authors, such as Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, wrote detective fiction. However, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the genre grew. Doyle wrote over fifty short stories and novels about Sherlock Holmes with his sidekick Dr. Watson. Doyle's characters are still popular today.
In the 1900s, many new detectives were introduced, securing that the genre continued to grow. Some of the more popular detectives were Endeavor Morse and Gervaise Fen, a creation of Edmund Crispin. Crispin is credited with taking the detective genre into a more contemporary direction.
◆Characteristics of Detective Fiction
Detective fiction is different from crime fiction and mystery fiction. It has some characteristics which makes it different from other.
Detective
Investigation
Crime
Complexity
A celebrated, skilled, professional investigator
Bungling local constabulary
Detective inquiries
Large number of false suspects
The "least likely suspect"
A reconstruction of the crime
A final twist in the plot
The period between World War I and World War II (the 1920s and 1930s) is generally referred to as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. During this period, a number of very popular writers emerged, including mostly British but also a notable subset of American and New Zealand writers. Female writers constituted a major portion of notable Golden Age writers. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh were particularly famous female writers of this time. Apart from Ngaio Marsh (a New Zealander), they were all British.
Various conventions of the detective genre were standardized during the Golden Age, and in 1929, some of them were codified by the English Catholic priest and author of detective stories Ronald Knox in his 'Decalogue' of rules for detective fiction. One of his rules was to avoid supernatural elements so that the focus remained on the mystery itself. Knox has contended that a detective story "must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery, a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end." According to scholars Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman,
"The golden age of detective fiction began with high-class amateur detectives sniffing out murderers lurking in rose gardens, down country lanes, and in picturesque villages. Many conventions of the detective-fiction genre evolved in this era, as numerous writers from populist entertainers to respected poets tried their hands at mystery stories."
◆Subgenres of Detective Fiction
●Standard private eye, or "hardboiled":-
Martin Hewitt, created by British author Arthur Morrison in 1894, is one of the first examples of the modern style of fictional private detective. This character is described as an "'Everyman' detective meant to challenge the detective-as-superman that Holmes represented." Michael Collins, pseudonym of Dennis Lynds, is generally considered the author who led the form into the Modern Age.
●Inverted detective:-
An inverted detective story, also known as a "howcatchem", is a murder mystery fiction structure in which the commission of the crime is shown or described at the beginning, usually including the identity of the perpetrator. The story then describes the detective's attempt to solve the mystery. There may also be subsidiary puzzles, such as why the crime was committed, and they are explained or resolved during the story. This format is the opposite of the more typical "whodunit", where all of the details of the perpetrator of the crime are not revealed until the story's climax.
●Police procedural:-
Many detective stories have police officers as the main characters. These stories may take a variety of forms, but many authors try to realistically depict the routine activities of a group of police officers who are frequently working on more than one case simultaneously. Some of these stories are whodunits; in others, the criminal is well known, and it is a case of getting enough evidence. We see some images in their study rooms, like
●Historical mystery:-
These works are set in a time period considered historical from the author's perspective, and the central plot involves the solving of a mystery or crime (usually murder). Though works combining these genres have existed since at least the early 20th century, many credit Ellis Peters's Cadfael Chronicles (1977–1994) for popularizing what would become known as the historical mystery.
●Cozy mysteries:-
"Cozy mysteries" began in the late 20th century as a reinvention of the Golden Age whodunit, these novels generally shy away from violence and suspense and frequently feature female amateur detectives. Modern cozy mysteries are frequently, though not necessarily in either case, humorous and thematic (culinary mystery, animal mystery, quilting mystery, etc.)
This style features minimal violence, sex, and social relevance; a solution achieved by intellect or intuition rather than police procedure, with order restored in the end; honorable and well bred characters; and a setting in a closed community. Writers include Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Elizabeth Daly.
●Serial killer mystery:-
Another subgenre of detective fiction is the serial killer mystery, which might be thought of as an outcropping of the police procedural. There are early mystery novels in which a police force attempts to contend with the type of criminal known in the 1920s as a homicidal maniac, such as a few of the early novels of Philip Macdonald and Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails. However, this sort of story became much more popular after the coining of the phrase "serial killer" in the 1970s and the publication of The Silence of the Lambs in 1988.
●Occult detective fiction:-
Occult detective fiction is a subgenre of detective fiction that combines the tropes of detective fiction with those of supernatural horror fiction. Unlike the traditional detective, the occult detective is employed in cases involving ghosts, demons, curses, magic, monsters and other supernatural elements. Some occult detectives are portrayed as knowing magic or being themselves psychic or in possession of other paranormal powers.
Detective fiction became very famous during 20th century. Let us see some of the famous writers and their books:
◆Agatha Christie:-
Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, (15 September 1890 12 January 1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which was performed in the West End from 1952 to 2020, as well as six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame for her contributions to literature.
●Notable works●
Creation of characters Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple
Murder on the Orient Express
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Death on the Nile
The Murder at the Vicarage
Partners in Crime
The A.B.C. Murders
And Then There Were None
The Mousetrap
◆Margery Allinghom:-
Margery Louise Allingham(20 May 1904 – 30 June 1966) was an English writer of detective fiction, best remembered for her "golden age" stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion.
Her notable works are the crime at black Dudley, mystery mile, look to the lady, police at the funeral, sweet danger, death of a ghost, flowers for the judge etc.
◆Dorothy Sayers:-
Dorothy Leigh Sayers (13 June 1893 – 17 December 1957) was an English crime writer and poet. She was also a student of classical and modern languages.
She is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories set between the First and Second World Wars that feature English aristocrat and amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. She is also known for her plays, literary criticism, and essays. Sayers considered her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy to be her best work. Sayers' obituarist, writing in The New York Times in 1957, noted that many critics at the time regarded The Nine Tailors as her finest literary achievement. Sayers received a degree in medieval literature from the University of Oxford in 1915, she was one of the first women to graduate from that university. Her first major published work was Whose Body? (1923), a detective novel in which Lord Peter first appeared as a dashing gentleman-tscholar. The book was followed by one or two novels a year for about 15 years. Sayers wrote short stories that featured not only Lord Peter but also another detective creation, Montague Egg. She also published an anthology of the detective story, The Omnibus of Crime (1929).
◆Arthur Morrison:-
Morrison, himself born in the East End, began his writing career in 1889 as subeditor of the journal of the People’s Palace, an institution designed to bring culture into the London slums. In 1890 he became a freelance journalist and in 1892 a regular contributor to William Ernest Henley’s National Observer, in which most of the stories in Morrison’s first major work, Tales of Mean Streets (1894), originally appeared. A Child of the Jago (1896) and To London Town (1899) completed this East End trilogy. Morrison published another powerful novel of slum life, The Hole in the Wall, in 1902. His realistic novels and stories are sober in tone, but the characters are portrayed with a Dickensian colourfulness. His attitude toward the people he described was paternalist, rather than radical, and he opposed socialism and the trades-union movement. He also wrote detective fiction that featured the lawyer-detective Martin Hewitt, published primarily in the Strand magazine (1894–96), it was the most successful rival to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
◆Arthur Conan Doyle:-
Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright and essayist in the 20th-century American theater. Sherlock Holmes is a fictional private detective created by Arthur Conan Doyle. Referring to himself as a "consulting detective" in the stories, Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science, and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic, which he employs when investigating cases for a wide variety of clients, including Scotland Yard.
Among his most popular plays are
● All My Sons (1947),
● Death of a Salesman (1949),
● The Crucible (1953),
● A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956).
He wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman has been numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century.
◆Raymond Chandler:-
Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. He was born in Chicago, Illinois and lived in the US until he was seven, when his parents separated and his Anglo-Irish mother brought him to live near London; he was educated at Dulwich College from 1900. After working briefly for the British Civil Service, he became a part-time teacher at Dulwich, supplementing his income as a journalist and writer mostly for The Westminster Gazette and The Academy. His output consisting largely of poems and essays was not to his taste, and the critic Paul Bishop considers the work as "lifeless", while Contemporary Authors describes it as
"lofty in subject and mawkish in tone".
◆His notable works◆
●The Big Sleep, Marlowe,
●The Long Goodbye,
●Farewell,
●My Lovely, more
●The Lady in the Lake,
●Trouble Is My Business, Blackmailers Don't Shoot.
◆L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace:-
These two writers together created John Bell, a “ghost exposer” who uses Holmesian techniques to unmask fake ghosts; these stories were collected in A Master of Mysteries in 1898. The two authors, both together and separately, created a number of other detectives, a few of them women, like Detective Florence Cusack (Meade) in “Mr. Bovey’s Unexpected Will” in Harmsworth Magazine in 1899, and Detective Norman Head in the 1899 volume The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings(Meade and Eustace). They both often used the locked-room mystery format; for example, in The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, the detective Norman Head solves “The Mystery of the Strong Room” when a diamond is stolen from a locked room by one of what was a new development, a villainous woman, Madame Koluchy, the head of an Italian criminal gang.
To wind up we can say that there were some of the authors of detective fiction during the time of early 20th century, which is considered as golden period of the detective fiction. So many writers tried this genre, many characters they created. From its born this genre has never died and today also film adaptation of these detective stories has been made. This genre is very popular in TV serials, newspaper stories, movies, comics and even in cartoons also. We can say that this genre has still great future.
