Gentleman detective
He (or she) has long been a staple of crime fiction, particularly in detective novels and short stories set in the United Kingdom in the Golden Age.
They are always well educated, frequently have unusual or eccentric hobbies, and are commonly found in their natural environment, an English country house.
C. Auguste Dupin, created by Edgar Allan Poe, is widely considered to be the first fictional detective in English literature.
[2] He appeared in three short stories written in the 1840s: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842) and "The Purloined Letter" (1844).
"[3] More specifically, Dorothy L. Sayers noted that "Sherlock Holmes modelled himself to a large extent upon (Poe's) Dupin, substituting cocaine for candlelight, with accompaniments of shag and fiddle-playing.
Like the much later Lord Peter Wimsey (see below), Dupin is a bibliophile, and met his narrator friend while both were searching for "the same rare and very remarkable volume" in an obscure library.
On her eighteenth birthday, she is bequeathed an enormous diamond; that night, this 'moonstone' is stolen from the country house of her mother, Lady Verinder.
As a retired army doctor, Dr Watson is far closer to the stereotypic English gentleman than Holmes, yet has no social reservations about beginning his long association with the detective.
Holmes had earlier attended university, where he began his detecting as an amateur (The Gloria Scott, 1893, and The Musgrave Ritual, 1893).
Like Alleyn but unlike earlier gifted amateurs such as Wimsey, Campion or Miss Marple, several modern "gentleman detectives" are professional policemen.
Much of the plot of the novels by Elizabeth George revolve around his working relationship with Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, who is of lower-class origins.
Both show greater loyalty to each other than to official regulations and accepted attitudes to their relative stations, and both are capable of self-sacrificing actions of noblesse oblige.
She was originally ACME Crimenet's most intelligent and distinguished lady detective with a flawless record in solved cases.
[14] DI Drake, the orphaned daughter of a solicitor and barrister, was reared from adolescence by her parents' associate after she witnessed their violent deaths and narrowly avoiding being killed with them.
A gunshot to her head in 2007 sends her back in time to 1981, three months before her parents' murders, and places her in the company of comparatively Neanderthal detectives who had transplanted themselves from the North a year earlier.
The well-schooled daughter of Lord Winfield, Lady Harriet is assigned as an armed detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police's [fictional] specialised task force, SI 10, and finds herself partnered with (and subordinate to) working-class NYPD Lieutenant James Dempsey who is on extended loan to the Met.
He has a characteristic southern accent, and uses a unique technique of interpreting information he calls Gravity's Rainbow to solve crimes.
