The aristocratic and eccentric Auguste Dupin was introduced by an anonymous narrator who became his sycophantic sidekick. This unequal relationship set the pattern of the brilliantly omniscient detective dazzling his obtuse, slow-witted friend, who is the storyteller. Other conventions were established, such as the plodding constabulary who overlook all but the most obvious clues, the locked-room mystery, the innocent cast under suspicion, the elucidation of the criminal mind by appreciating the murderer’s circumstances and motives, and the jaw-dropping dénouement that leaves everyone but the detective amazed. After solving the Rue Morgue murders, where, in a locked room, a corpse is discovered ‘thrust head downward up a chimney’, and an old woman’s body is found frightfully mutilated, the subsequent crimes that perplex Auguste Dupin are smaller. In ‘The Purloined Letter’ he recovers stolen correspondence, and in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ he establishes the fate of a murdered girl.
Poe set his detective stories in Paris, which encapsulated the Gothic and romantic traditions that inspired his work. Despite the notoriety that writing brought him, he remained a literary outsider in the United States, criticized for the blackness of his stories and for their European influence. He wrote out of ambition, but also to support his young wife, Virginia Clemm, who was dying of tuberculosis. She was his cousin, whom he had married when she was 13 years old. Stricken by grief and financial worry after her death, the destitute Poe drank heavily before dying prematurely in 1849. Ironically, when his own survival depended on the reason he so liberally instilled in Auguste Dupin, the archetypal sleuth vanished from his pages.
The Paris streets that stirred Poe’s imagination also contained the germ of his great detective. In 1829, the autobiography of retired policeman François Eugène Vidocq appeared on the city’s bookstalls. He was a former criminal who began his career as a police informant in prison. This was not unusual: ex-cons were employed as detectives by La Sûreté Nationale, which began in 1812, by London’s Bow Street Runners and by Scotland Yard following its founding in 1829. After 18 years working for the Sûreté, the 52-year-old Vidocq published his ghost-written four-volume Mémoires, containing a multitude of colourful anecdotes about the apprehension of an alleged 20,000 criminals. This fabulous concoction of fact and fiction became Poe’s inspiration.
But Dupin was not a professional policeman like Vidocq: he was an amateur detective assisting local law enforcement with his powers of observation and logic. One of the earliest fictional detectives on the police payroll was created by Frenchman Émile Gaboriau who started out, in 1853, by writing halfpenny thrillers that he published in daily instalments to satisfy a burgeoning market. Urban, industrialized life demanded the rudiments of education from an increasing proportion of the population. For the enterprising Gaboriau, this translated into a sizeable readership hungry for serialized escape from the drudgery of everyday life. Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq (who appeared in his first novel in 1866) helped to rehabilitate the public image of the police detective by removing some of its criminal taint. His writing introduced the layered plot with its complex twists, turns and unexpected dénouements.
Across the Channel, Gaboriau’s influence on the development of detective fiction was substantial. Although his stories lacked the monumental staying power of Poe’s, they could be found on the bookshelves of such great English masters as Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact, crime writer and critic Julian Symons believes Collins’s superbly crafted The Moonstone may have been influenced by the Frenchman’s three earliest crime stories, L’Affaire Lerouge, Le Crime d’Orcival and Le Dossier No. 113. Although The Moonstone was the first major detective novel published in English, the laurels for the first English detective go to Collins’s colleague and close friend Charles Dickens, who created the ineffable Inspector Bucket of Bleak House in 1853. Like Poe and Gaboriau, Collins and Dickens responded to popular demand for spellbinding, affordable literature by serializing their work. And Dickens demonstrated his remarkable foresight not only for writing classics but for publishing them, when, as editor of the All the Year Round magazine, he serialized The Moonstone. The episodes began appearing early in 1868 and the three-volume novel was published in July. The Moonstone was innovative because it made detection central to a story conceived on an epic scale. Immediate critical response to the book was subdued, but posterity has judged it differently. ‘Taking everything into consideration’, wrote Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, ‘The Moonstone is probably the very finest detective story ever written.’
Gaboriau was the inspiration for the 19th century’s bestselling crime novel, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, written by New Zealander Fergus Hume. It was his first novel. ‘I tried to get it published, but every one to whom I offered it refused to even look at the manuscript on the ground that no Colonial could write anything worth reading.’ Five thousand copies of the book were published at the author’s expense in Melbourne in 1886; subsequently an estimated million copies have sold around the world. Hume moved to England and continued writing detective novels for more than 30 years, but never with the same blockbuster success.
The maturity of the genre came in a prolific golden age of short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Empty waiting rooms and a threatened medical practice inspired the Scotsman to begin writing about a super-sleuth based on the special deductive skills of consulting surgeon Dr Joseph Bell, at the Edinburgh Infirmary where he trained. Sherlock Holmes was given life in A Study in Scarlet in 1887. Over 40 years, through 56 short stories and four novels, he would become the world’s greatest, and arguably most eccentric, detective. He was a cocaine addict, prone to ‘scraping away’ at his violin, and to prolonged periods lying prostrate on the couch in fits of depression. He was an alter ego to his creator, the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ arch-philistine Conan Doyle, and an anathema to most conservative Victorians, yet his power to capture the popular imagination was phenomenal. His pyrotechnic displays of detection won him cult-hero status.
Conan Doyle’s synthesis of existing approaches was superb. He adopted Poe and Gaboriau’s admiring narrator, creating his own faithful retainer, Dr John H. Watson. He eschewed the terror of Poe’s Gothic tales, but made high art of his conventions. His sleuth, an upper-class egotist like Auguste Dupin, was emotionally stilted, faintly misogynistic (if not misanthropic), and an amateur rather than a professional detective. He was an urban dweller living in a sleuthing ménage with his narrator. He observed the smallest clues, developed a psychological profile of the perpetrator, and drew on an awe-inspiring breadth of empirical knowledge. If Poe’s Dupin gave shape to Sherlock Holmes, then the complex twists and turns of Gaboriau’s stories suggested Conan Doyle’s consummate puzzle plots. He remains one of the greatest and most original exponents of the intricately woven whodunit. With flair, he fashioned the conventions of the guessing game between writer and reader into rules. The diverse settings for his multifarious plots gave weight to the words of Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’: ‘It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’ Crime could be close at hand; its location was in the complexities of human psychology.
Because public pressure foiled Conan Doyle’s attempt in 1893 to kill off Sherlock Holmes by pushing him and his nemesis Professor Moriarty over a waterfall, the sleuth lived much longer than his creator ever intended. In fact, the short-story form was in decline by 1927 when The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes brought this famous career to an end. Conan Doyle’s influence was immense, as was the part he played in a British-based literary lineage that included G. K. Chesterton, Edgar Wallace and others. In what could have been wasteland years between the two World Wars, the genre flourished, and, remarkably, the chief architects of this classical era of detective fiction were women.
On the surface the four Queens of Crime, as they became known, seemed to be conventional upper-class women with values rooted in the ‘smiling and beautiful countryside’ and lives untouched by their fetish subject, murder. But the conventions of the whodunit offered these very private women a perfect cover. When Agatha Christie introduced Hercule Poirot in The Mysterious Affair of Styles in 1920, she invested in the