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History of crime fictions

While the archetype for a murder mystery dates back to "The Three Apples" in the One Thousand and One Nights,^[1] crime fiction began to be considered as a serious genre only around 1900. The earliest known crime novel is "The Rector of Veilbye" by the Danish author Steen Steensen Blicher, published in 1829. Better known are the earlier dark works of Edgar Allan Poe (e.g., "The Murders in the Rue Morgue " (1841), " The Mystery of Marie Roget " (1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844). Wilkie Collins' epistolary novel The Woman in White was published in 1860, while The Moonstone (1868) is often thought to be his masterpiece. French author Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq (1868) laid the groundwork for the methodical, scientifically minded detective. The evolution of locked room mysteries was one of the landmarks in the history of crime fiction. The Sherlock Holmes mysteries of Arthur Conan Doyle are said to have been singularly responsible for the huge popularity in this genre. A precursor was Paul Féval, whose series Les Habits Noirs (1862–67) features Scotland Yard detectives and criminal conspiracies.
The evolution of the print mass media in the United Kingdom and the United States in the latter half of the 19th century was crucial in popularising crime fiction and related genres. Literary 'variety' magazines like Strand, McClure's, and Harper's quickly became central to the overall structure and function of popular fiction in society, providing a mass-produced medium that offered cheap, illustrated publications that were essentially disposable.
Like the works of many other important fiction writers of his day—e.g. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens—Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in serial form in the monthly Strand magazine in the United Kingdom. The series quickly attracted a wide and passionate following on both sides of the Atlantic, and when Doyle killed off Holmes in The Final Problem, the public outcry was so great, and the publishing offers for more stories so attractive, that he was reluctantly forced to resurrect him.
Later a set of stereotypic formulae began to appear to cater to various tastes.

Categories of crime fiction [edit]

Crime fiction can be divided into the following branches:

Detective fiction [edit]

Main article: Detective fiction

• The whodunit: The most common form of detective fiction. It features a complex, plot-driven story in which the reader is provided with clues from which the identity of the perpetrator of the crime may be deduced before the solution is revealed at the end of the book.
• Locked room mystery: A specialized kind of a whodunit in which the crime is committed under apparently impossible circumstances, such as a locked room which no intruder could have entered or left.
• Cozy: A subgenre of detective fiction in which sex, profanity or violence are downplayed or treated humorously.

Later and contemporary contributions to the whodunit [edit]

• The historical whodunnit: Also a sub-genre of historical fiction. The setting of the story and the crime has some historical significance
• The inverted detective story: Also known as "howcatchem", the commission of the crime and the identity of the perpetrator is revealed to the reader first, then the rest of the story describes the detective's attempt to solve the mystery.
• The American hard-boiled school: Distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex, the sleuth usually also confronts danger and engages in violence.
• The police procedural: The detective is a member of the police, and thus the activities of a police force are usually convincingly depicted.
• The legal thriller: The major characters are instead lawyers and their employees, and they become involved in proving their cases.
• The spy novel: The major characters are instead spies, usually working for an intelligence agency.
• Caper stories and the criminal novel: Stories told from the point of view of the criminals.
• The psychological suspense: This specific sub-genre of the thriller genre also incorporates elements from detective fiction, as the protagonist must solve the mystery of the psychological conflict presented in these types of stories.
• Spoofs and parodies.

Crime fiction and mainstream fiction [edit]

When trying to pigeon-hole fiction, it is extraordinarily difficult to tell where crime fiction starts and where it ends. This is largely attributed to the fact that love, danger and death are central motifs in fiction. A less obvious reason is that the classification of a work may very well be related to the author's reputation.
For example, William Somerset Maugham's (1874–1966) novella Up at the Villa (1941) could very well be classified as crime fiction. This short novel revolves around a woman having a one-night stand with a total stranger who suddenly and unexpectedly commits suicide in her bedroom, and the woman's attempts at disposing of the body so as not to cause a scandal about herself or be suspected of killing the man. As Maugham is not usually rated as a writer of crime novels, Up at the Villa is hardly ever considered to be a crime novel and accordingly can be found in bookshops among his other, "mainstream" novels.
A more recent example is Bret Easton Ellis's (born 1964) seminal novel American Psycho (1991) about the double life of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street yuppie and serial killer in the New York of the 1980s. Even though in American Psycho the most heinous crimes are depicted in minute detail, the novel has never been labelled a "crime novel", maybe because it is never explicitly mentioned whether Bateman actually commits the crimes or rather just fantasizes about them.
On the other hand, U.S. author James M. Cain is normally seen as a writer belonging to the "hard-boiled" school of crime fiction. However, his novel Mildred Pierce (1941) is really about the rise to success of an ordinary housewife developing her entrepreneurial skills and—legally—outsmarting her business rivals, and the domestic trouble caused by her success, with, in turn, her husband, her daughter and her lover turning against her. Although no crime is committed anywhere in the book, the novel was reprinted in 1989 by Random House, alongside Cain's thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), under the heading "Vintage Crime".
When film director Michael Curtiz adapted Mildred Pierce for the big screen in 1945, he lived up to the cinemagoers' and the producers' expectations by adding a murder that is not in the novel. As potential cinemagoers had been associating Cain with hard-boiled crime fiction only, this trick—exploited in advertisements and trailers—in combination with the casting of then Hollywood star Joan Crawford in the title role made sure that the film was going to be a box office hit even before it was released.
Seen from a practical point of view, one could argue that a crime novel is simply a novel that can be found in a bookshop on the shelf or shelves labelled "Crime". (This suggestion has actually been made about science fiction, but it can be applied here as well.) Penguin Books have had a long-standing tradition of publishing crime novels in paperback editions with green covers and spines (as opposed to the orange spines of mainstream literature), thus attracting the eyes of potential buyers already when they enter the shop. But again, this clever marketing strategy does not tell casual browsers what they are really in for when they buy a particular book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_fiction