Who was the first detective novel?

Poisoning, hypnotists, kidnappers and a series of crimes "in their nature and execution too horrible to contemplate": The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix, believed to be the first detective novel ever published, is back in print for the first time in a century-and-a-half.

Although Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, published in 1868, and Emile Gaboriau's first Monsieur Lecoq novel L'Affaire Lerouge, released in 1866, have both been proposed as the first fictional outings for detectives, the British Library believes The Notting Hill Mystery "can truly claim to be the first modern detective novel".

Serialised between 1862 and 1863 in the magazine Once a Week, the novel was published in its entirety in 1863 but has been out of print since the turn of the century. It stars the insurance investigator Ralph Henderson, as he works to bring the sinister Baron "R___" to justice for murdering his wife to obtain a large life insurance payout. Using diary entries, letters, crime reports, witness interviews, maps and forensic evidence – "innovative techniques that would not become common features of detective fiction until the 1920s", says the British Library – Henderson's investigation slowly plays itself out, uncovering along the way an evil mesmerist, a girl kidnapped by gypsies, poisoners and three murders.

"Is that chain one of purely accidental coincidence, or does it point with terrible certainty to a series of crimes, in their nature and execution too horrible to contemplate?" asks the author Felix, a pseudonym for the journalist, traveller and lawyer Charles Warren Adams. The story's reception at the time was positive: the Guardian called it "very ingeniously put together", the Evening Herald said that "the book in its own line stands alone", while the London Review appears to be getting to grips with what a detective story actually is, describing The Notting Hill Mystery as "a carefully prepared chaos, in which the reader, as in the game called solitaire, is compelled to pick out his own way to the elucidation of the proposed puzzle".

The author Julian Symons identified The Notting Hill Mystery as the first detective novel in 1972, calling its primacy "unquestionable" and its plot "strikingly modern". The British Library first made the novel available via print-on-demand last March, as part of a collection of hundreds of 19th century novels. While most sold just two to three copies apiece, The Notting Hill Mystery took off following a glowing write-up in the New York Times which identified Adams as its author and described its ending as both "ingenious and utterly mad", selling hundreds of copies and prompting the library to issue its new trade edition this month.

"It's a great read, written in a very matter-of-fact way – as Paul Collins describes it in the New York Times, it's both utterly of its time and utterly ahead of it," said commissioning editor Lara Speicher. "At the beginning of the book you know what the crime is, then he gradually leads you through all the events leading up to the crime, and only at the end reveals how it happened. He keeps you going through the book. Modern fans of crime fiction would definitely enjoy it."

The British Library's new edition has been produced using photographs of the original 1863 edition, which featured illustrations by George du Maurier, grandfather of Daphne.

An introduction to the history of the detective story

Since this is a short history of the detective story, it will, inevitably, make some pretty glaring omissions. We’d love to hear from detective fiction aficionados in the comments section below, for any other interesting takes on mystery and detective tales.

The first detective story is a hard thing to call. ‘The Three Apples’ in Arabian Nights is sometimes given the honour, but whether this is a detective story even in the loosest sense is questionable, since the protagonist fails to make any effort to solve the crime and find the murderer of the woman. Many say the mantle should go to another tale with a title beginning ‘The Three …’, namely ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’, a medieval Persian fairy tale set on Sri Lanka (Serendip being a Persian name for the island) – the princes are the ‘detectives’ and find the missing camel more by chance (or ‘serendipity’; this word was coined by Horace Walpole, author of the first Gothic novel, and has been in use ever since) than by their powers of reasoning.

The first modern detective story is often said to be Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) but in fact E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Das Fräulein von Scuderi’ predates it by over twenty years. There is also a story titled ‘The Secret Cell’ from 1837, and written by Poe’s own publisher, William Evans Burton, which predates ‘Rue Morgue’ by a few years and is an early example of a detective story – in the tale, a policeman has to solve the mystery of a kidnapped girl.

The first detective novel is often held to be The Moonstone (1868) by Dickens’s friend and collaborator, Wilkie Collins. However, The Notting Hill Mystery (1862-3) predates it by five years. It was published under a pseudonym; the real author has never been conclusively proved. Some argue that the first detective novel had appeared over a century before: Voltaire’s Zadig (1748) was an influence on Poe in the creation of C. Auguste Dupin. Others mention Dickens’s own novel, Bleak House (1853), as an important book in the formation of the modern detective novel, since it features Inspector Bucket, the policeman who must solve the murder of the lawyer, Tulkinghorn.

Sherlock Holmes is the most famous fictional detective ever created, and has to be one of the most famous fictional characters in the world, alongside Hamlet, Peter Pan, Oedipus (whose history may qualify as the first detective story in all of literature), Heathcliff, Dracula, Frankenstein, and others. Holmes was created, of course, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and is largely a mixture of Poe’s Dupin – several of Dupin’s ‘tricks’ even turn up in the Sherlock Holmes stories – and Dr Joseph Bell, a real-life doctor who taught Doyle at the University of Edinburgh when Doyle studied Medicine there. Nobody can decide whether Holmes’s creator should be known as ‘Conan Doyle’ or just ‘Doyle’, by the way. Is Conan a middle name, or part of a (non-hyphenated) double-barrelled surname? The jury’s out.

Sherlock Holmes doesn’t really make deductions: strictly speaking, his reasoning takes the form of induction, which is slightly different. In logic, deduction means drawing conclusions from general statements, whereas induction involves specific examples (the cigarette ash on the client’s clothes, the clay on their boots, etc.). Alternatively, some logicians have also suggested that Holmes’s reasoning is something called abduction, rather than either deduction or induction: abductive reasoning involves forming a hypothesis based on the evidence to hand, which is a rather neat summary of what Holmes does. Perhaps he is a master of abduction, rather than induction (and certainly not of deduction).

Following the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and the rise in popularity of the ghost story and horror novel during the late nineteenth century, a new subgenre emerged: the ‘psychic detective’, who solved crimes of a (possibly) supernatural origin, often in a Sherlockian style. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr Hesselius is often cited as the first such character, although he doesn’t do much solving himself: most of the time he merely sits in a chair and listens. The most popular character to emerge out of this subgenre was the ‘psychic doctor’ John Silence, created by horror writer Algernon Blackwood. Blackwood’s John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908) was the first volume of fiction to be advertised on roadside billboards, and became a bestseller as a result.

In the twentieth century, Endeavour Morse (who was always a Chief Inspector, never plain old ‘Inspector Morse’, despite the title of the television series) was merely one in a long list of Oxford detectives. Some notable detectives who predate him are Lord Peter Wimsey, created by Dorothy L. Sayers, and Oxford professor Gervase Fen, created by ‘Edmund Crispin’, real name Bruce Montgomery, who was a contemporary of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis at Oxford during the early 1940s. Crispin has been called one of the last great exponents of the classic detective novel. Montgomery was a skilled painter and composer, too: among other achievements, he composed the musical scores for numerous Carry On films.

The most popular writer of detective fiction of all time is probably Agatha Christie – and there are so many fascinating Agatha Christie facts that we’ve dealt with her in a separate post. To learn more about classic detective stories, discover these 10 great rivals of Sherlock Holmes and the forgotten author of this comic crime novel from the genre’s golden age.

In a mystery novel, a crime is committed. The crime is commonly a murder, but thefts or kidnappings are also popular. The action of the story revolves around the solution of that crime – determining who did it and why, and ideally achieving some form of justice. 

There are many specific subtypes within the mystery genre: police procedurals, hard-boiled detective stories, espionage thrillers, medical or forensic mysteries, cozy mysteries, closed-room mysteries, and courtroom dramas, to name a few. As myriad as they sound, they all sprouted from the same authors and history.   

The rapid growth of urban centers in the 19th century meant that more police were needed. This spurred the advent of professional detectives whose chief job was to investigate crimes. Although there are examples of puzzle stories that reach back through time to when some of the earliest poems or tales were written down, most people agree that the first modern ‘detective story’ is The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe. First published in the April 1841 issue of Graham’s Magazine, the short story tells the tale of an amateur detective who sets out to solve the grisly murders of a mother and daughter within a locked room of their apartment on the Rue Morgue. 

Nearly twenty years after Poe’s story, Wilkie Collins published The Woman in White (1859), which is considered the first mystery novel, and The Moonstone (1868), generally considered the first detective novel. The Woman in White is a gripping tale of murder, madness and mistaken identity that is so beloved it has never been out of print. Collins had “Author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction” engraved on his tombstone. The Moonstone set the standards for the detective novel formula – an enormous diamond is stolen from a Hindu temple and resurfaces at a birthday party in an English manor, and with numerous narrators and suspects, the story weaves through superstitions, romance, humor and suspicion to solve the puzzle.   

The Moonstone’s title as the first detective novel is contested by two other books. The first, The Notting Hill Mystery, was published in 1865 and written under the pen name Charles Felix, who is believed to be Charles Warren Adams, sole proprietor of the publishing house Saunders, Otley, and Company. In The Notting Hill Mystery, the main character figures out the culprit of murder through diary entries, family letters, chemical analysis, depositions, and a crime scene map. Many of these detective techniques were not used again until the novels of the 1920s. 

A French mystery, L’Affaire Lerouge (1866) by Émile Gaboriau, is also considered a pioneering detective novel. One of the first stories to use the gathering of evidence to solve the murder mystery, it combines police intrigue and a love story – two mothers, two sons, and one father (a Count).  L’Affaire Lerouge, first published in English as The Widow Lerouge or The Lerouge Case, introduced the concept of an amateur detective as well as a recurring character trope, featuring a young police officer named Monsieur Lecoq who was featured in several of Gaboriau’s later novels. 

The Dead Letter, published in 1866 by Beadle’s Monthly Magazine, is credited with being the first detective story by a woman. It was written under the name Seeley Regester, a nom de plume for author Metta Victoria Fuller Victor who wrote more than 100 dime novels. The Dead Letter is also the first full-length American work of crime fiction. 

In 1878, Anna Katherine Green introduced the first American detective in The Leavenworth Case. The Leavenworth Case is widely noted as one of the first American bestsellers, selling 750,000 copies in its first decade and a half of publication. Green would pave the way for many prolific and talented women writers in the genre. 

But unlike The Leavenworth Case that eventually fell out of favor and out of print, Robert Louis Stevenson, who had success with Treasure Island in 1883, published the classic mystery The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886. Initially sold as a ‘penny dreadful’ in the UK and US, more than 40,000 copies of the book had been sold within six months, and soon after more than 250,000 copies were pirated in America. The book and its characters have infiltrated not only literature but also film, television, and popular culture ever since. 

1886 was also the year The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was published in Australia, written by Fergus Hume. The mystery about a body discovered in a Hansom cab in the city of Melbourne was very successful in Australia, and it went on to be published in America and Britain, selling over 500,000 copies worldwide. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab initially outsold a new release by Arthur Conan Doyle, one that introduced a character that would soon take over the world of detective fiction. 

In 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle sold the rights to a story called A Study in Scarlet for £25. It was published first in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, and later in 1888 as a novel by Ward, Lock & Co.  Doyle was 27 years old when it was published and wrote the story in a reported three weeks.  A Study in Scarlet was the first work to feature Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Doyle went on to write 56 short stories featuring Holmes and a total of four full-length novels in what is considered the Canon of Sherlock Holmes. The novels in the Canon following A Study in Scarlet are The Sign of Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902) and The Valley of Fear (1914-1915).  

Mary Roberts Rinehart published The Circular Staircase in 1908, creating the ‘had I but known’ school of mystery writing. The Circular Staircase, about a spinster aunt who solves mysteries at a rented summer house, became a best-seller and made Rinehart a household name. She wrote hundreds of stories and forty novels. At her death, her novels had sold 10 million copies, and it is said at her prime she sold more books than Agatha Christie, to whom she’s often compared, although many of her works pre-date Christie’s. 

The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), a collection of 12 stories, started the prolific career of G. K. Chesterton, who is credited with being the father of the ‘cozy’ mystery. Father Brown solved crimes more by intuition and a deep understanding of human nature than by experimentation and scientific deduction. 

1915’s The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan is one of the earliest ‘man-on-the-run thrillers that would later be a popular plot device for mysteries and often used in movies as well. In the novel, Richard Hannay, an expatriate Scot, is an ordinary man met by extraordinary circumstances, who puts his own safety and interests aside to protect his country at the outset of WWI. The novel was very popular with troops during the First World War, and the author followed it up with multiple sequels. 

And into the Golden Age…

These books all led up to what is considered ‘The Golden Age’ of crime writing in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the most beloved authors of this period were British and writing in either the ‘cozy’ or ‘country house’ mystery style. Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh are often dubbed the Queens of this Golden Age. Quite a few American writers followed suit until some broke out in a distinct ‘hard-boiled’ style as “pulp” novels were popularized.

The popularity of detective fiction waned with the outbreak of WWII, never again reaching the peak of the Golden Age, yet many mystery books continue to be published and consumed in the subsequent decades. 

We’ll be taking a look at the most collectible mystery novels in our Book Collecting By the Year series starting on January 30. Want to get updates in your inbox when we add a new decade? Join our mailing list here.

Amy C. Manikowski is a writer living in Asheville, NC.