Crime Writer Margot Kinberg

Crime fiction has been around for a long time, and it’s become solidly established as one of the most popular genres of fiction. That makes it easy to forget that crime fiction, like lots of other things, was invented. And since its invention, several innovations have created some of the different subgenres we know and love today. It’s easy to take those all for granted, but if you think about it, they all shaped the genre.

Many scholars argue that the first example of modern detective fiction was Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which was published in 1841. In the story, his sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin, discovers the truth about the deaths of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter Camille. The story involves unexplained death, the police who investigate, and the amateur sleuth who actually solves the riddle. Those elements would eventually become staples of the modern detective story. Interestingly this story is also argued to be the first example of the locked room/impossible mystery. When the two women’s bodies are discovered, the room they’re in is locked, and so is the window. Dupin, then, has to deduce not just who killed the victims, but also how they were killed. Whatever one thinks of the story’s quality, it was arguably a literary invention.

At first, detective stories were whodunits, where the reader is challenged to deduce who the criminal is, and there are still millions of whodunits being written. But not all mysteries are like that. There’s also the inverted mystery, where the reader knows from the beginning who the killer is and often how the murderer is committed. The suspense comes as the detective works to catch the criminal. Any fan of the TV show Columbo will find this setup familiar. This subgenre was arguably invented by R. Austin Freeman, and it’s on display in his short story The Case of Oscar Brodski. In the story, Silas Hickler, a jewel thief, murders Oscar Brodski, who is a diamond merchant, and puts his body on nearby railroad tracks to be run over by the next train. Readers know from the beginning how and why the murder is committed, and by whom. The question really is how Dr. John Thorndyke, Freeman’s sleuth, will catch the killer. As it happens, Thorndyke is riding on the train that strikes Hickler’s body, so he’s early on the scene. And it’s interesting to see what clues he uses to catch up with the reader, so to speak.

For several decades, the crime-fictional sleuth was a private detective (e.g. Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot) and not a police detective. Some sleuths (like Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey) were amateurs. In some of these stories, the sleuth has a good relationship with the police; in others, that’s not the case. But the real inventor of the police procedural, where a cop is the protagonist, is arguably Lawrence Treat, whose V as in Victim was published in 1945. In it, we follow Mitch Taylor, a ‘regular cop,’ who works with lab technician Jub Freeman to solve two cases. One is a hit-and-run killing where none of the witnesses seem to have noticed anything about the offending car. The other is the bludgeoning death of insurance salesman Peter Jarvis. The two deaths could be related, so Taylor and Freeman look to find out a connection. Some people have claimed that Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, published in 1868, is a proto-police procedural, since the sleuth in that case is London police detective Sergeant Cuff. And of course, the police procedural is still an extremely popular subgenre.

There’s possibly a bit less agreement on which author invented the noir crime story, since several writers (e.g. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett) explored noir at a similar time. But one of the names that comes up frequently is James M. Cain, probably most famous for stories such as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. In both of those stories, we see the hallmarks of what’s usually thought of as a noir story: morally compromised, even amoral, characters; bleak situations and endings; dark stories. Many of these stories are gritty, too. Noir has become well established, to the point where there are now a variety of noir categories (domestic noir, Scandi noir, ‘Tartan’ noir, etc.).

And what about lighter mysteries such as cozies? That’s a little harder to pin down, since people’s definition of what counts as ‘cozy’ varies, and a mystery can be a lighter mystery without being cozy. Lots of people think of Agatha Christie’s work when they think of cozies, but there’s an argument that her work wasn’t really in that category. Some people argue that Christie’s work is better described as ‘traditional style.’ That said, Christie certainly did carve out a space for the sort of amateur sleuth (e.g. Miss Marple) story with a minimum of violence and explicitness that we often associate with a cozy mystery.

It’s hard (at least for me) to imagine what life might have been without these innovators. I mean, can you see a literary world without crime fiction? And without all of the hard-working authors who write in that genre?

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Fred Thomas’ Something New.