Historical whodunnit. INTERNATIONAL SISTER FIDELMA SOCIETY. The Athenian Murders - José Carlos Somoza - Google Books. Detective fiction. Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—either professional or amateur—investigates a crime, often murder. Beginnings of detective fiction[edit] In ancient literature[edit] Early Arab detective fiction[edit] The earliest known example of a detective story was The Three Apples, one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). In this story, a fisherman discovers a heavy, locked chest along the Tigris river and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid. When Harun breaks open the chest, he finds inside it, the dead body of a young woman who had been cut into pieces.
The main difference between Ja'far ("The Three Apples") and later fictional detectives, such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, is that Ja'far has no actual desire to solve the case. Early Chinese detective fiction[edit] Early Western detective fiction[edit] Establishment of the genre[edit] Dorothy L. Sayers.
Dorothy Leigh Sayers (usually pronounced /ˈseɪ.ərz/, although Sayers herself preferred /ˈsɛərz/ and encouraged the use of her middle initial to facilitate this pronunciation;[1] 13 June 1893 – 17 December 1957) was a renowned English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator and Christian humanist. She was also a student of classical and modern languages. She is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories set between the First and Second World Wars that feature English aristocrat and amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, that remain popular to this day. However, Sayers herself considered her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy to be her best work.
She is also known for her plays, literary criticism and essays. Biography[edit] Childhood, youth and education[edit] Sayers, an only child, was born on 13 June 1893 at the Head Master's House, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, her father, the Rev. Career[edit] Poetry, teaching, and advertisements[edit] "(...) Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes (/ˈʃɜrlɒk ˈhoʊmz/) is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh Medical School. A London-based "consulting detective" whose abilities border on the fantastic, Holmes is known for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to adopt almost any disguise and his use of forensic science to solve difficult cases.
Holmes, who first appeared in print in 1887, was featured in four novels and 56 short stories. The first novel, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887 and the second, The Sign of the Four, in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890. The character's popularity grew with the first series of short stories in The Strand Magazine, beginning with "A Scandal in Bohemia" in 1891; additional short-story series and two novels (published in serial form) appeared from then to 1927.
Inspiration for the character Life Early life Holmes's first appearance in 1887 Retirement. YouTube. Joseph Bell. Joseph Bell, JP, DL, FRCS (2 December 1837 – 4 October 1911) was a Scottish lecturer at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh in the 19th century. He is perhaps best known as an inspiration for the literary character Sherlock Holmes. Life and career[edit] Bell was a great-grandson of Benjamin Bell, a forensic surgeon. In his instruction, Joseph Bell emphasized the importance of close observation in making a diagnosis. Bell studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School and received an MD in 1859.
Bell wrote the book Manual of the Operations of Surgery which was published in 1883.[1] Joseph Bell died on 4 October 1911. Inspiration of Sherlock Holmes[edit] Dramatisation[edit] In the BBC television series Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes was a fictionalised account of Doyle's time as Bell's clerk. In 2006, Stone Publishing House published a book, written by historian Dr. Memorial[edit] Grave[edit] References[edit] External links[edit] Margery Allingham. Margery Louise Allingham (20 May 1904 – 30 June 1966) was an English crime writer, best remembered for her detective stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion. Life and career[edit] Childhood and schooling[edit] Margery Allingham was born in Ealing, London in 1904 to a family immersed in literature. Her father, Herbert John Allingham, and her mother Emily Jane were both writers - he was editor of the Christian Globe and The New London Journal (to which Margery later contributed articles and Sexton Blake stories), before becoming a successful pulp fiction writer, while her mother was a contributor of stories to women's magazines.
Soon after Margery's birth, the family left London for Essex, living in an old house in Layer Breton, a village near Colchester. Early writings[edit] Her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, was published in 1923 when she was 19. Her first work of detective fiction was a serialized story published by the Daily Express in 1927. Campion and success[edit] Golden Age of Detective Fiction. The Golden Age of Detective Fiction was an era of classic murder mystery novels produced by various authors, all following similar patterns and style. Origins[edit] Mademoiselle de Scudéri, by E.T.A. Hoffmann 1819, in which Mlle de Scudery, a kind of 19th-century Miss Marple, establishes the innocence of the police's prime suspect in the murder of a jeweller, is sometimes cited as the first detective story and a direct influence on Edgar Allan Poe's later 1841 short story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", featuring the literary sleuth C.
Auguste Dupin.[1] Some years later, in 1868, Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone. The culminating achievement of the early school of detective fiction was the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, which formed the model for the Golden Age in general. The Golden Age[edit] Description of the genre[edit] The rules of the game – and Golden Age mysteries were considered games – were codified in 1929 by Ronald Knox.[4] According to Knox, a detective story.
Agatha Christie. Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, DBE (née Miller; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English crime novelist, short story writer, and playwright. She also wrote six romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best known for the 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections she wrote under her own name, most of which revolve around the investigations of such characters as Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Parker Pyne, Harley Quin/Mr Satterthwaite, and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. She wrote the world's longest-running play, The Mousetrap.[1] Born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, Christie served in a hospital during the First World War, before marrying and starting a family in London. She was initially unsuccessful at getting her work published; but in 1920 The Bodley Head press published her novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring the character of Hercule Poirot.
This launched her literary career. Life and career[edit] Death[edit] Hercule Poirot. Overview[edit] Influences[edit] Poirot's name was derived from two other fictional detectives of the time: Marie Belloc Lowndes' Hercule Popeau and Frank Howel Evans' Monsieur Poirot, a retired Belgian police officer living in London.[1] A more obvious influence on the early Poirot stories is that of Arthur Conan Doyle. In An Autobiography Christie admits, "I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp".[2] For his part, Conan Doyle acknowledged basing his detective stories on the model of Edgar Allan Poe's C.
Poirot was a francophone. Popularity[edit] By 1930, Agatha Christie found Poirot "insufferable", and by 1960 she felt that he was a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep". Appearance and propinquities[edit] Captain Arthur Hastings' first description of Poirot: He was hardly more than five feet four inches but carried himself with great dignity. Methods[edit] Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes. Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Rayner Lowndes, née Belloc (5 August 1868 – 14 November 1947), was a prolific English novelist. Active from 1898 until her death, she had a literary reputation for combining exciting incident with psychological interest. Her most famous novel, The Lodger (1913), based on the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888, has been adapted for the screen five different times; the first movie version was Alfred Hitchcock's silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), followed by Maurice Elvey's in 1932, John Brahm's in 1944, Man in the Attic in 1953, and David Ondaatje's in 2009.
Another novel of hers, Letty Lynton (1931), was the basis for the 1932 motion picture of the same name starring Joan Crawford. Born in Marylebone, London and raised in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, Mrs Belloc Lowndes was the only daughter of French barrister Louis Belloc and English feminist Bessie Parkes. She published a biography, H.R.H. Bibliography[edit] H.R.H. References[edit] Miss Marple. Jane Marple, usually referred to as Miss Marple, is a fictional character appearing in 12 of Agatha Christie's crime novels and in 20 short stories. Miss Marple is an elderly spinster who lives in the village of St. Mary Mead and acts as an amateur detective. Alongside Hercule Poirot, she is one of the most loved and famous of Christie's characters and has been portrayed numerous times on screen.
Her first appearance was in a short story published in The Sketch magazine in 1926, "The Tuesday Night Club",[1] which later became the first chapter of The Thirteen Problems (1932). Her first appearance in a full-length novel was in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. Origins[edit] There is no definitive source for the derivation of the name 'Marple'.[4] The most common explanation is that the name was taken from Marple railway station in Stockport, through which Christie passed. Character[edit] Miss Marple solves difficult crimes because of her shrewd intelligence, and St. Films[edit] Sensation novel. Themes and reception[edit] Typically the sensation novel focused on shocking subject matter including adultery, theft, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction and murder.[2] It distinguished itself from other contemporary genres, including the Gothic novel, by setting these themes in ordinary, familiar and often domestic settings, thereby undermining the common Victorian-era assumption that sensational events were something foreign and divorced from comfortable middle-class life.
W. S. Gilbert satirised these works in his 1871 comic opera, A Sensation Novel. For Anthony Trollope, however, the best novels should be "at the same time realistic and sensational...and both in the highest degree".[3] When sensation novels burst upon a quiescent England these novels became immediate best sellers, surpassing all previous book sales records.
Notable examples[edit] Contemporary tributes[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] Wilkie Collins. Collins published his best known works in the 1860s, achieving financial stability and an international reputation. During this time he began suffering from gout, and developed an addiction to opium, which he took (in the form of laudanum) for pain. He continued to publish novels and other works throughout the 1870s and 80s, but the quality of his writing declined along with his health. He died in 1889. Biography[edit] Early life[edit] In 1835 Collins began attending school at the Maida Vale academy. Early writing career[edit] An instrumental event in Collins's career occurred in March 1851, when he was introduced to Charles Dickens by a mutual friend, the painter Augustus Egg. He joined the staff of Household Words in October 1856. In 1858 Collins began living with Caroline Graves and her daughter Harriet. 1860s[edit] The Woman in White was serialised in All the Year Round from November 1859 to August 1860, and was a great success.
Later years[edit] Works[edit] True crime. H. H. Holmes. Herman Webster Mudgett (May 16, 1861[1] – May 7, 1896[2]), better known under the name of Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, was one of the first documented American serial killers in the modern sense of the term. In Chicago at the time of the 1893 World's Fair, Holmes opened a hotel which he had designed and built for himself specifically with murder in mind, and which was the location of many of his murders. While he confessed to 27 murders, of which nine were confirmed, his actual body count could be as high as 200.[3] He took an unknown number of his victims from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which was less than two miles away, to his "World's Fair" hotel.
Early life[edit] Mudgett was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire,[4] May 16, 1861, to Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Price, both of whom were descended from the first European settlers in the area. On January 28, 1887, while he was still married to Clara, Holmes married Myrta Belknap (b. Chicago and the "Murder Castle"[edit] Mary Ann Cotton. Mary Ann Cotton (born Mary Ann Robson; 31 October 1832 – 24 March 1873) was an English woman convicted of murdering her children. She was believed to have murdered up to 21 people, mainly by arsenic poisoning. Early life[edit] Mary Ann Robson was born on 31 October 1832 at Low Moorsley (now part of Houghton-le-Spring in the City of Sunderland) and baptised at St Mary's, West Rainton on 11 November. When Mary Ann was eight, her parents moved the family to the County Durham village of Murton, where she went to a new school and found it difficult to make friends. Soon after the move her father fell 150 feet (46 m) to his death down a mine shaft at Murton Colliery.
In 1843, Mary Ann's widowed mother, Margaret (née Lonsdale) married George Stott, with whom Mary Ann did not get along. At the age of 16, she moved out to become a nurse at Edward Potter's home in the nearby village of South Hetton. Husband 1: William Mowbray[edit] Husband 2: George Ward[edit] Husband 3: James Robinson[edit] Belle Gunness. Belle Sorenson Gunness (born as Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth; November 11, 1859 – April 28, 1908) was a Norwegian-American serial killer. Standing six feet tall (183 cm) and weighing over 200 pounds (91 kg), she was a physically strong woman.[2] She killed most of her suitors and boyfriends, and her two daughters, Myrtle and Lucy.
She may also have killed both of her husbands and all of her children, on different occasions. Her apparent motives involved collecting life insurance, cash and other valuables, and eliminating witnesses. Reports estimate that she killed between 25 and 40 people over several decades. Biography[edit] Early years[edit] An Irish TV documentary by Anne Berit Vestby aired on September 4, 2006, tells a common, but unverified, story about Gunness' early life. Following the example of a sister, Nellie Larson, who had emigrated to America earlier, Gunness moved to the United States in 1881 and assumed a more American-style name.
First victim[edit] The suitors[edit] Ole B. Jack the Ripper. Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes. The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Casebook: Jack the Ripper - Main.