Cover

Title

GOLDEN AGE
DETECTIVE STORIES

OTTO
PENZLER,
EDITOR

AMERICAN
MYSTERY
CLASSICS

GOLDEN AGE
DETECTIVE STORIES

INTRODUCTION

ONE of the favorite sports of mystery critics, historians, and scholars is trying to determine when the mystery genre began, who invented it, and what is the first story or novel in the genre. The other favorite occupation is defining what a mystery is in the first place.

I am not eager to get sucked into the first controversy, in which some have claimed the Bible, specifically Cain slaying Abel, as the first murder story, though there’s not much mystery involved. Others point to Shakespeare, notably Macbeth, but murder and puzzlement turn up in other of his plays as well.

The first memorable act of pure detection is often credited to Voltaire, when his character Zadig makes observations of ordinary facts and then infers events that he could not have seen. Although not specifically involved with crimes, his deductions made him the first systematic detective in literature in 1748.

Embracing the notion of observation and deduction in the solution to criminal mysteries, Edgar Allan Poe can claim with great justification the honor of inventing the detective short story in 1841 when he produced “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” William Leggett’s “The Rifle” preceded Poe’s tale by fourteen years and is largely a textbook of observation and deduction, but the author was not as gifted a storyteller as the master and his story quickly faded into obscurity. Most writers of introductions to mystery books are quite content to leave the honor of invention to Mr. Poe.

While more and more bits of what is now regarded as the mystery novel were added to gothic fiction, they finally coalesced in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-1853) to produce a detective, Inspector Bucket, within the confines of a larger novel with greater ambition than producing a detective novel. Wilkie Collins, a close friend to Dickens, soon followed with The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), described by T.S. Eliot as the first, the longest, and the best detective novel ever written.

With the creation of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1887) and, more significantly, the short stories that followed in 1891 and after, the detective story was in full bloom and has never again lost its position as a successful and much-loved literary form.

The history of mystery fiction does not have definitive moments, chiseled in granite, that define the exact time when it can be inarguably stated that—aha!—that is the moment, or the author, or the story, that changed literature forever.