Detective story: the most famous writers and detectives

February 1st, 2010 | Posted by shenandoah

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Inventor of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe also created the first among the most famous detectives in literature. In three of their stories – “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Purloined Letter” (1845) and “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1845) – the French detective C. Auguste Dupin is responsible for solving crimes from his reasoning logical rigor. Dupin is the first to show how the intellect, from clues, evidence and observation skills, can come to conclusions completely rational and surprising to uncover the story behind the crime and find the culprit.

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But although the inventor of detective stories, Poe is more devoted to the mysteries related to terror, not fully developing the personality of Dupin. In the late 19th century, however, would appear the most famous detective in literature: Sherlock Holmes. Created by British author Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes is the protagonist of 60 adventures that made him the most popular detective of all time. The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes takes on the novel “A Study in Scarlet,” published in 1887. The detective shows the same mind and deductive logic Dupin, but appears to be much more than its predecessor. Holmes is melancholy, has bouts of depression, plays violin and is dependent on drugs like cocaine and morphine. He acts in a duet with the doctor dr. John Watson, who is who will narrate the adventures from the viewpoint of a privileged observer and participant of the stories.

Three decades after the success of Sherlock Holmes, another detective will delight readers with her adventures of solutions of mysterious crimes. The Belgian Hercule Poirot was a creation of British author Agatha Christie. He starred in nearly a hundred stories, including stories, novels and plays. Emotive and elegant, Poirot is also uses his deductive mind to assemble the puzzles that investigates the puzzling cases. His debut was the novel “The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920. In addition to Poirot, Agatha Christie also wrote detective stories with a female protagonist: Miss Marple, an old lady spinster resident of rural England that was the central character in twelve novels, written between 1930 and 1971. The first mystery solved by Miss Marple is narrated in the book “Murder at the Vicarage.”

While Agatha Christie began writing the stories lived by Monsieur Poirot and Miss Marple, on the other side of the Atlantic, the detective novel gained popularity through the so-called pulp fictions, magazines gathered tales of science fiction and adventure. Among the writers who cooperated to the pulp fictions were Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, two names that would become masters of American detective fiction. As Dupin, Holmes, Poirot and Marple were characters in stories told mainly from memory, the American detective story narrative is simultaneous with what is happening. Another difference is that in it the ambience of the story is not restricted to the more privileged classes.

The detective created by Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett – respectively, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade – are critical of the social structures around them and their actions take place in an environment inserted in marginality. Instead of strictly logical minds endowed with, they are men of action, with a perception that comes far more from their practical knowledge about the behavior of humans than the skill of their minds deductible. Marlowe and Spade are so much closer to dealing with marginal types. Their personalities are characterized by sarcasm, by violence and disappointment. The outcome of cases is never presented as a logical deduction that comes to an unquestionable truth.

The fawn of the success of American detective fiction, the genre has consolidated worldwide and has continued to produce great writers and characters. Among them stand out Ross MacDonald, with the detective Lew Archer, Rex Stout, with the detective Nero Wolf and Georges Simenon, with Commissioner Jules Maigret.