Mystery film

Several series of mystery films started in the 1930s with major studios featuring detectives like Nick and Nora Charles, Perry Mason, Nancy Drew and Charlie Chan.

Mystery films mainly focus on a crime or a puzzle, usually a murder, which must then be solved by policemen, private detectives, or amateur sleuths.

This ranged to American, British, German and Danish adaptations of Sherlock Holmes and European series like Nick Carter, Nat Pinkerton and Miss Nobody.

[4] In the 1930s, most of the major Hollywood film studios produced mystery series, with MGM having Nick and Nora Charles and Joel and Garda Sloane, Warner Bros. having Perry Mason, Torchy Blane, Brass Bancroft and Nancy Drew.

About every character from the 1930s drew from literature, such as Charlie Chan, Nick and Nora Charles, Thatcher Colt, Perry Mason, and Mr. Wong.

[6] These included Chester Morris as Boston Blackie, Warner Baxter as the Crime Doctor, Warren William as the Lone Wolf and Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.

Marlowe would appear again in The Big Sleep (1946) while other films author Martin Rubin deemed as notable detective mysteries included Laura (1944).

[11] Sandberg noted that only by the 2020s, specifically with Kenneth Branagh's 2017 The Murder on the Orient Express had the genre been financially successful again with more than $350 million grossed worldwide, leading to a sequel Death on the Nile (2022).