Victorian Detective Fiction

Literary genre that emerged in the 19th century and focuses on the detection of a crime by a professional or amateur sleuth.

Overview

Crime and its detection have long been a subject matter of world literature and can be found even in the apocryphal stories of the Bible (e.g. Daniel 13). Nevertheless, detective fiction in a narrower sense was a product of the 19th century. Characteristic elements of the genre are a suspenseful narrative starting with an unsolved crime, clues, ‘red herrings’, and the investigation and ultimate solution of the mystery by a detective. More precise definitions of detective fiction vary greatly since it shares many features with related genres.

The American author Edgar Allan Poe is generally credited with having written the first modern detective story ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue", 1841). However, several British writers also played a decisive part in the development of the genre: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Context

Several factors contributed to the emergence of Victorian detective fiction:

• the establishment of a professional police force: a centralized Metropolitan police - nicknamed ‘Bobbies’ after Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel – in 1829 and a Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in 1843
• a growing public interest in matters of law enforcement and criminal prosecution
• the development of scientific methods of detection (Bertillon System, 1882)
• rationalism (regarding the analytic methods of the detective) and/or romanticism (regarding the ‘mystery’ to be solved)
• the emergence of affordable mass media, particularly magazines
• Caroline Reitz argues that 19th-century detective fiction also answered to feelings of insecurity and that it discussed broader social issues: “the detective use[s] observation and deduction to grapple with the challenges of modernity” [1]

Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins

The works of Dickens (1812-1870) und Collins (1824-1889) mark the transition between two genres by integrating a detective mystery into the 19th-century ‘sensation novel’. Both authors were inspired by real-life police inspectors and well-publicised crimes (the Manning and the Constance Kent case).

Between 1850 and 1856, Charles Dickens wrote a series of non-fictional articles for his magazine Household Words, praising the work of the London police (“On Duty with Inspector Fields”, “The Detective Police”). In 1852/53, he published the Bleak House, the first English novel with a police inspector as one of its main characters. Dickens’s last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), which deals with the strange disappearance of its eponymous hero, remained unfinished and thus left the readers with an eternal puzzle to solve.

Two novels by Dickens’s close friend Wilkie Collins also played an important role in the development of detective fiction: The Woman in White (1859/60), and particularly The Moonstone (1868). The story of The Moonstone is told by several of the characters and deals with the theft and recovery of a mysterious Indian diamond. Although the crime is not solved by the detective but through a medical experiment, the novel already contained many elements of later detective stories: “a secluded country-house […]; a dinner-party ending in the theft of the diamond, putting the whole household under suspicion; […] a series of false trails followed by the least expected of denouements” (Gilmour 115).

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) invented the two most famous protagonists of detective fiction: the brilliant and eccentric private detective Sherlock Holmes and his naïve sidekick and chronicler Dr Watson. Sherlock Holmes made his debut in the novel A Study in Scarlet (1887). Until 1927, he applied his forensic skills and ‘science of deduction’ in three further novels and 56 short stories, many of which were published in serial form in the Strand Magazine. In his detective stories, Conan Doyle takes up and enlarges the narrative pattern introduced by E.A. Poe.

Even in their own time, the Sherlock Holmes stories became a tremendous success. So much so that the author famously tried to rid himself of his detective by having him drown in the Swiss Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem” (1893). However, protests by outraged readers and financial considerations led to the resurrection of Sherlock Holmes in the story of “The Empty House” (1903).

Conan Doyle's stories left their mark on the entire genre: they influenced numerous later authors of detective stories, were imitated in pastiches or updated by setting them in the present (e.g. Sherlock, BBC mini series, 2010).

Literature

Gilmour, Robin. The Novel in the Victorian Age: A Modern Introduction. London: Arnold, 1986.

Nayder, Lilian. “Victorian Detective Fiction.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. William Baker and Kenneth Womack. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2002. 178-187.

Nusser, Peter. Der Kriminalroman. 4th rev. and enl. ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009.

Reitz, Caroline. "Detective Fiction." The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Oxford: OUP, 2005. Universitätsbibliothek Bochum. 20 October 2010 <http://www.oxford-britishliterature.com/entry?entry=t198.e0134>.

Schmidt, Mirko F. “Detektivroman.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur: Begriffe und Definitionen. Ed. Dieter Burdorf, Christoph Fasbender and Burkhard Moenninghoff. 3rd rev. ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007. 146.