Crime fiction is a typically 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century genre, dominated by British and American writers. This article explores its historical development as a genre.
Crime fiction in history Crime Fiction came to be recognised as a distinct literary genre, with specialist writers and a devoted readership, in the 19th century. Earlier novels and stories were typically devoid of systematic attempts at detection: There was a detective, whether amateur or professional, trying to figure out how and by whom a particular crime was committed; there were no police trying to solve a case; neither was there any discussion of motives, alibis, the modus operandi, or any of the other elements which make up the modern crime writing.
Early Arabic crime stories An early example of an Arabic-language crime story is "The Three Apples", one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). In this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy, locked chest along the Tigris river and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who then has the chest broken open only to find inside it the dead body of a young woman who was cut into pieces. 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. The story has been described as a "whodunit" murder mystery Unlike the modern crime fiction genre, no investigation is conducted, and the case is instead solved by two men confessing to the crime. The focus of the story shifts to the caliph's demand to find a slave blamed for having an affair with the woman, instigating her husband's crime of passion, but again no investigation is conducted. Ja'far learns the true story, and exonerates the slave, by chance.
Early Chinese crime stories Gong'an is a genre of Ming dynasty Chinese crime fiction that includes Bao Gong An (Chinese:包公案) and the 18th-century novel Di Gong An (Chinese:狄公案). The latter was translated into English as Dee Goong An (Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee) by Dutch sinologist Robert Van Gulik, who then used the style and characters to write an original Judge Dee series.
The hero of these novels is typically a traditional judge or similar official based on historical personages, such as Judge Bao (Bao Qingtian) or Judge Dee (Di Renjie). Although the historical characters may have lived in an earlier period (such as the Song or Tang dynasties), the novels are often set in the later Ming or Manchu period.
These novels differ from the Western genre in several points as described by van Gulik: The detective is the local magistrate who is usually involved in several unrelated cases simultaneously. The criminal is introduced at the start of the story, and his crime and reasons are carefully explained, thus constituting an inverted detective story rather than a "puzzle". The stories have a supernatural element, with ghosts telling people about their deaths and even accusing the criminal. The stories were filled with digressions into philosophy, the complete texts of official documents, and much more, making for very long books. The novels tended to have a huge cast of characters, typically in the hundreds, all described as to their relation to the various main actors in the story. Little time is spent on the details of how the crime was committed, but a great deal on the torture and execution of the criminals, even including their further torments in one of the various hells for the damned.
Van Gulik chose Di Gong An to translate because it was in his view closer to the Western tradition and more likely to appeal to non-Chinese readers.
Early Hindi Crime Stories The history of Hindi crime stories remains very rich and evolving as a part of Indian literature, through general socio-political changes and increased interest in psychological and social complexities. The genre has seen remarkable development from its early stages until the modern era by blending traditional storytelling and contemporary narrative techniques.
Early Beginnings The first tracings of Hindi crime fiction date back to history in the 20th century. Some early authors are Chandrakanta, who wrote at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. They started to also create crime and mystery, although these often formed part of folk and supernatural tales rather than being purist crime. This started emerging with an attraction to crime stories early on as the majority of these were on the model of Western crime stories and detective fiction.
Golden Age and Prominent Authors The two main authors considered pioneers are Rachmaninoff and Gaurav Bhatnagar. Thereafter, another author of some significance in popularizing Hindi detective fiction was Chandan Bachchi whose novels such as Talash-o-Khoj and Sayar Aur Chhupa Rustam are good examples of the genre. The mid-20th century saw Surender Mohan Pathak into the scene, who gained legendary popularity and is credited to have remodeled modern Hindi crime fiction with his pieces, structurally and stylistically attaining shocking—page-turning—narratives and elaborate characterizations. His novels are considered to be of hallmark quality in the genre owing to the gripping narratives and detailed characterizations.
The Hindi crime fiction began to take its forms in the later part of the twentieth and in the twenty-first century, developing these ways, addressing such contemporary issues of today's time and measuring new dimensions of crime and mystery. Hindi writers like Nisha Sinha and Vikram Chandra, in fact, set completely new directions for the very genre of Hindi crime fiction by blending the traditional with modern social issues and psychological depth.
Today, there are many strands of Hindi crime fiction, influential towards reflecting the challenges of Indian society and grasping at a wide array of readers, changing the tales and forming newer approaches toward the titular conception of crime.
Description of crimes and detectives
Forerunners of today's crime fiction include the ghost story, the horror story, and the revenge story. Early examples of crime stories include Thomas Skinner Surr's anonymous Richmond (1827), Steen Steensen Blicher's The Rector of Veilbye (1829), Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1839), and Maurits Christopher Hansen's "Mordet paa Maskinbygger Roolfsen" - The Murder of Engineer Roolfsen (1839).
An example of an early crime/revenge story is American poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe's (1809–1849) tale "The Cask of Amontillado", published in 1846.Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z. Checkmark Books, 2001. p. 45 Poe created the first fictional detective (a word unknown at the time) in the character of C. Auguste Dupin, as the central character of some of his short stories (which he called "tales of ratiocination"). In the words of William L. De Andrea (Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, 1994), he
"Locked-room" mysteries
One of the early developments started by Poe was the so-called locked-room mystery in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Here, the reader is presented with a puzzle and encouraged to solve it before finishing the story and being told the solution.
These stories are so-called because they involve a crime—normally a murder—which takes place in a "locked room". In the simplest case, this is literally a hermetically sealed chamber, which to all appearances, no one could have entered or left at the time of the crime. More generally, it is any crime situation where—again, to all appearances—someone must have entered or left the scene of the crime, yet it was not possible for anyone to have done so. (For example, one such Agatha Christie mystery (And Then There Were None) takes place on a small island during a storm; another is on a train stalled in the mountains and surrounded by new-fallen, unmarked snow.) One of the most famous locked-room mysteries was The Hollow Man. The resolution of such a story might involve showing how the room was not really "locked", or that it was not necessary for anyone else to have come or gone; that the murderer is still hiding in the room, or that the person to "discover" the murder when the room was unlocked in fact committed it just then.
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson mysteries
In 1887, Scotsman Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) gave fresh impetus to the emerging form of the detective story by creating Sherlock Holmes, resident at 221B Baker Street, London—probably the most famous of fictional detectives and the first one to have clients, to be hired to solve a case. Holmes's art of detection consists in logical deduction based on minute details that escape everyone else's notice, and the careful and systematic elimination of all clues that in the course of his investigation turn out to lead nowhere. Conan Doyle also introduced Dr. John H. Watson, a physician who acts as Holmes's assistant and who also shares Holmes's flat in Baker Street.
The Golden Age
The 1920s and '30s are commonly known as the "Golden Age" of detective fiction. Most of its authors were British: Agatha Christie (1890–1976), Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957), and many more. Some of them were American, but with a British touch. By that time, certain conventions and clichés had been established, which limited any surprises on the part of the reader to the twists and turns within the plot and of course to the identity of the murderer. Most of novels of that era were whodunnits, and several authors excelled, after successfully leading their readers on the wrong track, in convincingly revealing to them the least likely suspect as the real villain of the story. What is more, they had a predilection for certain casts of characters and certain settings, with the secluded English country house at the top of the list.
A typical plot of the Golden Age mystery followed these lines: A body, preferably that of a stranger, is found in the library by a maid who has just come in to dust the furniture. As it happens, a few guests have just arrived for a weekend in the country—people who may or may not know each other. They typically include such stock characters as a handsome young gentleman and his beautiful and rich fiancée, an actress with past glory and an alcoholic husband, a clumsy aspiring young author, a retired colonel, a quiet, middle-aged man about whom no one knows anything, who is supposedly the host's old friend, but behaves suspiciously, and a famous detective. The police are either unavailable or incompetent to lead the investigation for the time being.
Hardboiled American crime-fiction writing
An American reaction to the cozy convention of British murder mysteries was the American hardboiled school of crime writing (certain works in the field are also referred to as noir fiction). Writers Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), Jonathan Latimer (1906–1983), Mickey Spillane (1918–2006), and many others decided on an altogether different, innovative approach to crime fiction. This created whole new stereotypes of crime fiction writing. The typical American investigator in these novels, was modeled thus: