Crime fiction
Harun orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and find the murderer within three days, or be executed if he fails his assignment.
Also, Thomas Skinner Surr's anonymous Richmond is from 1827; another early full-length short story in the genre is The Rector of Veilbye by Danish author Steen Steensen Blicher, published in 1829.
A further example of crime detection can be found in Letitia Elizabeth Landon's story The Knife, published in 1832, although here the truth remains in doubt at the end.
[9] His brilliant and eccentric detective C. Auguste Dupin, a forerunner of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, appeared in works such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844).
A precursor was Paul Féval, whose series Les Habits Noirs (1862–67) features Scotland Yard detectives and criminal conspiracies.
Literary 'variety' magazines, such as Strand, McClure's, and Harper's, quickly became central to the overall structure and function of popular fiction in society, providing a mass-produced medium that offered cheap, illustrated publications that were essentially disposable.
Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens—Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in serial form in the monthly Strand in the United Kingdom.
The genre was outlawed by the Fascists during WWII, but exploded in popularity after the war, especially influenced by the American hard-boiled school of crime fiction.
In the late 1910s, Cheng began writing his own detective fiction series, Sherlock in Shanghai, mimicking Conan Doyle's style, but relating better to a Chinese audience.
As used by S. S. Van Dine, fictional character Philo Vance also took advantage of an inflated personality and a high-class background in a plethora of novels.
Ellery Queen was featured in several novels written by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, serving as both a character and pen name.
[14] Past the Golden Age, events such as the Great Depression and the transition between World Wars ushered in a change in American crime fiction.
[16] Dashiell Hammett and his work, including Red Harvest (1929), offered a more realistic social perspective to crime fiction, referencing events such as the Great Depression.
In the late 1930s and 1940s, British County Court Judge Arthur Alexander Gordon Clark (1900–1958) published a number of detective novels under the alias Cyril Hare, in which he made use of his profoundly extensive knowledge of the English legal system.
When he was still young and unknown, award-winning British novelist Julian Barnes (born 1946) published some crime novels under the alias Dan Kavanagh.
[21] The plot-puzzle formula, which was frequent in the Golden Age, makes use of potential hints and solutions to drive a story forward in order to unravel mysteries.
Examples include numerous works by John le Carré and Gorky Park (1981), which was written by Martin Cruz Smith.
[20] Melville Davisson Post’s Rudolph Mason: The Strange Schemes (1896) and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) are notable examples.
A popular, well-known example is Agatha Christie, whose texts, originally published between 1920 and her death in 1976, are available in UK and US editions in all English-speaking nations.
Christie's works, particularly featuring detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple, have given her the title the Queen of Crime, and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre.
[24] Other less successful, contemporary authors who are still writing have seen reprints of their earlier works, due to current overwhelming popularity of crime fiction texts among audiences.
Recent examples include Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (originally published in 1955), Ira Levin's Sliver (1991), with the cover photograph depicting a steamy sex scene between Sharon Stone and William Baldwin straight from the 1993 movie, and again, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991).
This series includes, for example, Ethel Lina White's novel The Wheel Spins (1936), which Alfred Hitchcock—before he went to Hollywood—turned into a much-loved movie entitled The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Ira Levin's (born 1929) science-fiction thriller The Boys from Brazil (1976), which was filmed in 1978.
