Classic Detective Fiction

Turn-of-the-century Britain: 'The first Golden Age'

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

'It was with the re-emergence in the 1880s and 1890s of the short-story series formula engineered by Poe that detective fiction pure and simple took its next great leap forward.

'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first two novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four,paved the way for the simple but financially brilliant idea Doyle later described thus in his autobiography Memories and Adventures: 'It had struck me that a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine.'

'In 1891 this idea was realized in the transference of Holmes to the short-story series formula in the new Strand magazine' (Priestman, Crime Fiction)

Holmes and Watson on their way to Dartmoor to investigate the disappearance of Silver

Blaze (illustration in Strand Magazine, 1892

'[Doyle's] medical training, particularly, seems to lie behind his conception of Sherlock Holmes as 'a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal,' an investigator both masterful in his grasp of analytic principles and keenly aware of the importance of details. Expert medical diagnosis (detection) required both the scientist's training in inductive reasoning and the clinician's educated eye for the often subtle symptoms (clues) of disease' (Hodgson, Introduction to Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories)

'To become a best-seller like [Conan Doyle] a writer of crime stories has to embody in the detective a set of values which the audience finds convincing, forces which they can believe will work to contain the disorders of crime. What then were the values that gave power to the Holmes phenomenon - what does the great detective stand for?

'In the first place he stands for science, that exciting new nineteenth-century force in the public mindHe can explain the causes of material evidence either by 'the science of deduction', as Doyle calls it, or through his knowledge of forensic facts and criminal history. That was a vividly contemporary and credible force against crime. But it also had its inherent drawbacks, as many people found facts and objective science potentially anti-humaneDoyle avoided such a bad aura by making the second major value of his great detective that equally potent contemporary force - individualism: the essence of humanity as it seemed to many then, and now. Holmes isn't only a man of objective science: he's also aloof, arrogant, eccentric, even bohemian. His exotic character humanises his scientific skills: a lofty hero, but crucially a human one.' (Knight, in Hodgson (ed), Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories)

Successors to Sherlock Holmes

'In writing about most of Sherlock Holmes's immediate successors one has to make a change of gear. The interest of their work lies in the cleverness with which problems are propounded and solved, rather than in their ability to create characters or to write stories interesting as tales rather than as puzzles. The amount of talent at work in this period gives it a good claim to be called the first Golden Age of the crime story, but it should be recognized that the metal is nine-carat quality, whereas the best of the Holmes stories are almost pure gold

'At the centre was always the personality of the detective, who appeared in several series of stories. A number of dichotomies mark these detectives, but the clearest division is between those in the Holmes category of Supermen, with no emotional attachments and little interest in everyday life, and the inconspicuous ordinary men who solve their cases by the application of common sense rather than by analytic deduction.' (Symons, Bloody Murder)

Arthur Morrison

'The Sherlock Holmes stories soon had their imitators, at least after the success of the first two Strand series in the early 1890s. Arthur Morrison, otherwise known for realistic accounts of life in London's East End, created the amiable if deliberately colourless Martin Hewitt' (Ousby, Crime and Mystery Book)

'The detective as ordinary man is embodied in the Martin Hewitt stories written by Arthur Morrison (1863-1945). The first series of them ran in the Strand during 1894In looks and behaviour Hewitt represents a conscious reaction - and almost the first reaction, as the date shows - from the Superman detective. He is a 'stoutish clean-shaven man, of middle height and of a cheerful, round countenance', who 'maintains that he has no system beyond a judicious use of ordinary faculties.'' (Symons, Bloody Murder)

R. Austin Freeman and G.K. Chesterton

'The next generation of rivals, appearing before the Furst World War, was more formidableBy any estimate two figures stand out: R. Austin Freeman's Dr Thorndyke and G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown. Where Conan Doyle had been content to deal in the principles of science, and to convey its glamorous aura, Thorndyke's cases involve its details: they depend on bench work and laboratory analysisFew, if any, writers had the expertise to follow Freeman so deeply into the technicalities of forensic scienceBut they could all agree on the general lessons that there was no harm in making the technicalities in their stories subtle and that they had better get the details right. The happy days when Holmes could judge a man's intelligence by the size of his hat, or tell which direction a bicycle had travelled from its tyre marks, were numbered

'The Father Brown stories had a more direct impact, not least in starting a tradition of clerical detectives that still continues. Their great strength lies in the way they embed the detective puzzle in a metaphysical-cum-theological fable without making it any less satisfying as a puzzle. Chesterton's sophistication finds an ideal vehicle in the character of Father Brown himself. With his meek manner, his umbrella and his brown-paper parcels, he is one of the few early detectives, if not the only one, to escape successfully the long shadow cast by Sherlock Holmes. A detective without charisma, without apparent distinction, seemingly without any of the qualities which make a detective: Chesterton's conception would prove as influential as Conan Doyle's.' (Ousby, Crime and Mystery Book)

The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) was the first of the series of books to feature this character