Detective fiction centers a story on the solution of a crime, typically a murder, through a detective's systematic application of reasoning and observation to physical and testimonial evidence. Edgar Allan Poe founded the genre with three stories, most famously The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in Graham's Magazine in April 1841, featuring the Parisian amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin and Poe's own term for his method, ratiocination. Poe's Dupin tales established the genre's recurring shape, an inexplicable crime, a baffled official police force and a private reasoner who solves it through logic, that Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot both directly descend from.
Facts
Place of OriginMarks the origin of the genre's English-language founding text; earlier antecedents exist in Arabic and Chinese narrative traditions. Notable ExampleEdgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) 1 Defining TraitAn investigator solves a crime, typically a murder, through systematic reasoning and observation applied to physical and testimonial evidence. 1 Connections
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Encompasses Form
Features Author
The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is the genre's founding work, introducing C. Auguste Dupin and the amateur-reasoner template.
Source The Cambridge History of the English Short Story
The genre's founding work.
Source The Cambridge History of the English Short Story
Form Of Genre
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.s.v. detective storyQuote, s.v. detective story
the first fictional detective, the eccentric and brilliant C. Auguste Dupin
The Cambridge History of the English Short Story
- Features Author: Edgar Allan Poe
- Features Author: The Murders in the Rue Morgue
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