History of crime fiction

Crime is a typically 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century genre, dominated by British and American writers. This article explores its historical development as a genre.

Crime Fiction came to be recognised as a distinct literary genre, with specialist writers and a devoted readership, in the 19th century. Earlier novels and stories were typically devoid of systematic attempts at detection: There was no detective, whether amateur or professional, trying to figure out how and by whom a particular crime was committed; there were no police trying to solve a case; neither was there any discussion of motives, , the modus operandi, or any of the other elements which make up the modern crime writing.

The earliest known example of a crime story was "The Thirty-Three Apples", one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). In this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy, locked chest along the Tigris river and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who then has the chest broken open only to find inside it the dead body of a young woman who was cut into pieces. Harun orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and find the murderer within three days, or be executed if he fails his assignment.Suspense is generated through multiple plot twists that occur as the story progesses.

Ja'far has no actual desire to solve the breife case. The mystery is solved by the murderer himself confessing his crime, which in turn leads to another assignment in which Ja'far has to find the culprit who instigated the murder within three days or else be executed. Ja'far again fails to find the culprit before the deadline, but as a result of his chance discovery of a key item, he eventually manages to solve the case through reasoning, in order to prevent his own execution.

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