Mystery is one of the most popular literary genres. The early years of the mystery genre set the stage for contemporary whodunits, hard-boiled detective mysteries, modern thrillers, and cozy mysteries.
Mysteries have always existed, but in the 1800s, authors began to create specific types of protagonists to solve crimes.
Edgar Allen Poe’s 1841 short story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is the first mystery featuring a police detective. The first full length mystery novels are The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1859), The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix, the alleged pen name of Charles Warren Adams (1862), and The Moonstone, also by Collins (1868).
Wilkie Collins holds the distinction of writing the first mystery novel and the first mystery novel featuring a detective though the protagonist in The Notting Hill Mystery uses detective techniques such as analyzing journal entries and family letters, interviews, chemical analysis, and a crime scene map.
The Dead Letter (1866) by Seeley Regester, the pen name of Metta Victoria Fuller Victor is the first crime novel by an American and the first detective novel by a woman. The Leavenworth Case (1878) by Anna Katherine Green is the first American crime novel to become a bestseller.
French author Émile Gaboriau combined mystery and romance in his 1866 detective novel, L’Affaire Lerouge. The protagonist gathers evidence. His character reappears in other novels.
Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson explores the concept of good and evil in the mind of a criminal with a split personality in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).
Australian author Fergus Hume published The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) about a dead body being discovered in a Melbourne Hansom cab. Hume’s story was popular in Australia, Britain, and the United States. It initially outsold Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, which introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Doyle would go on to write 56 short stories and four full-length novels featuring Holmes and Watson.
Before Agatha Christie penned her first novel, Mary Roberts Rinehart published The Circular Staircase in 1908. Rinehart’s protagonist, Rachel Innes, is a middle-aged spinster who solves mysteries. Her novels are equal parts mystery, humor, and romance. Rinehart penned forty novels and hundreds of short stories.
In 1911, G.K. Chesterton wrote The Innocence of Father brown, a collection of twelve stories featuring Father Brown as and amateur sleuth who solved cases using his intuition and understanding of human nature. Chesterton is considered the creator of the cozy mystery.
Born in Perth Australia in 1875 and educated in Scotland and England, John Buchan published two volumes of essays, four novels, and two anthologies of poems and stories before his twenty-fifth birthday.
Buchan published The Thirty-nine Steps in 1915, and his classic “man on the run spy thriller” has never been out of print.
In the 1920s mysteries entered the Golden Age, but that’s a story for our May 2027 issue.
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