Mystery Fiction/Trivia
A short history of Mystery Fiction
- 1841: Edgar Allan Poe publishes the first modern detective story, "The Murders at the Rue Morgue," with the prototypical detective, C. August Dupin.
- 1866: Emile Gaboriau publishes L'Affaire Lerouge (The Widow Lerouge), the first in his Monsieur Lecoq detective series, the successor to Dupin.
- 1868: Wilkie Collins, already well known for his book The Woman in White, publishes The Moonstone, the first English detective novel (Poe's being short stories).
- 1887: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publishes A Study in Scarlet (46 years after Poe), which provides the world with Sherlock Holmes. In that story, he includes a Take That against Dupin and Lecoq.
- 1910: Starting with the short story "The Blue Cross," G. K. Chesterton introduces the widely influential Father Brown.
- 1912: R Austin Freeman invents the Reverse Whodunnit with the stories in his collection The Singing Bone.
- 1920: Agatha Christie publishes The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the first with her detective Hercule Poirot.
- 1923: Starting with Whose Body?, Dorothy L. Sayers gleefully lampshades the mystery genre so far with her Lord Peter Wimsey series.
- 1927: Edward Stratemeyer (under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon) introduces the world to the Hardy Boys, probably the first Kid Detectives, in The Tower Treasure.
- 1929: Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, under the collective pseudonym of their hero, publish The Roman Hat Mystery, the first appearance of Ellery Queen.
- 1930:
- Stratemeyer and writer Mildred Wirt (under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene) introduce the world to Nancy Drew in The Secret of the Old Clock.
- Agatha Christie introduces the Little Old Lady Investigates trope with The Murder at the Vicarage and Miss Marple.
- Dashiell Hammett writes The Maltese Falcon, the novel which introduces Sam Spade, the Trope Codifier for the Private Detective.
- 1945: The Mystery Writers of America is founded.
- 1949: Robert van Gulik translates and publishes Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, introducing traditional Chinese mystery to Western audiences.