These detectives include amateurs, private investigators and professional policemen.
They are often popularized as individual characters rather than parts of the fictional work in which they appear.
Stories involving individual detectives are well-suited to dramatic presentation, resulting in many popular theatre, television, and film characters.
The first famous detective in fiction was Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin.
[1] Later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes became the most famous example and remains so to this day.