Long Range Trends in Mystery Fiction

Casebook Fiction Tree | Intuitionist Writers Tree | Scientific Detection Tree

A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page

Casebook Fiction Tree

Here is a tree, showing the relationships of different schools of mystery writers. Each member of the tree can have literary "children"; these are shown in a list below that person. For example, the tree is stating that the group "Casebook writers of the 1890's" is the parent of "Rogue Fiction", which is in turn the parents of three children: "Mystery Offshoots of Rogue Fiction", "Frederick Irving Anderson" and "Early Spy and Thriller Writers". The tree starts in the 1860's, and gradually works its way forward in time. It is a way to look at very long term relationships between various groups of mystery creators.

British Casebook writers of the 1860's; "Waters", Charles Martel, Andrew Forrester, Anonyma

Australian Casebook Writers: James Skipp Borlase, Mary Fortune
Émile Gaboriau
- Anton Chekhov
H. de Vere Stacpoole
Arthur Upfield
Nick Carter and other Dime Novel Writers
Casebook writers of the 1890's: Arthur Morrison, Max Pemberton, C. L. Pirkis
- Rogue Fiction
  - Mystery Offshoots of Rogue Fiction: Grant Allen, J.S. Fletcher, Robert Barr
  - Frederick Irving Anderson
  - Early Spy and Thriller Writers
    - E. Phillips Oppenheim
      - Richard Harding Davis
      - Frank L. Packard: Secret Identity Rogue Fiction
        
        Carroll John Daly
        
        Erle Stanley Gardner
        Robert Leslie Bellem
        William E. Barrett
        Forest Rosaire
        Dashiell Hammett
        
        Paul Cain
        Julius Long
        Frederick Nebel
        
        Hugh B. Cave
        T. T. Flynn
        Raymond Chandler
        
        Modern Private Eye Novelists
        Howard Browne
        
        Second Generation Black Mask Writers of the Early 1930's
        Comic Hard-Boiled Writers: Norbert Davis, Frank Gruber
        
        Merle Constiner
        Dale Clark
        Richard Sale
        Robert Reeves
        
        Hero Pulps: Walter Gibson, Frederick M. Davis
        
        Superhero Comics
    - William Le Queux
      - Margery Allingham
      - Movie Serials: Louis Feuillade
      - Fritz Lang
        
        Semidocumentary Police Films and TV Shows: 1945 - 1953
        
        Undercover Police TV Shows of the 1980's

These writers form a huge body of mystery fiction, going back in a tradition that reaches into the 1860's.

Most focus heavily on detectives, men who try to solve crimes. Some focus instead on Rogues, clever criminals.

Disguise and undercover operations play a heavy role in most of this fiction. In other words, there is a direct connection between FBI agent Vinnie Terranova going undercover on the TV show Wise Guy in the 1980's, and Lecoq's use of disguise in Gaboriau's Le Crime d'Orcival in the 1860's.

There is typically not a heavy use of the puzzle plot in this mystery fiction. There are exceptions: in the pulps, both Gardner and Bellem combined this tradition with the puzzle plotting that was the center of their Intuitionist contemporaries of the Golden Age. On the whole, however, while there are mysteries, detectives and detective work in these tales, the puzzle plot is largely absent.

Subliterary Media

Many of these writers appeared in media other than books. These media tended to be less prestigious than regular books. These media include casebooks, dime novels, pulp magazines, B movies, comic books, movie serials and TV crime shows. These media are all considered "subliterary". They are outlets that are considered automatically to mark anything that appears in them with a taint, suggesting that it is clearly written to artistic standards below the norm. Whether or not that this judgment is correct is another matter: I will go on to argue in the Guide that many of these works show considerable artistic accomplishment. But the official perception of these formats by most leaders of our culture is that they and their contents are systematically inferior.

These media are also often considered to be targeted to a lower class audience. Not the absolute poor, in most cases; rather to the working classes that were on the bottom of the social heap. This is clearly not entirely true: Black Mask's readers included Dorothy L. Sayers, for instance, the Oxford educated daughter of an English clergyman. Still, the working class stigma clings to this fiction. It is part of its whole subliterary reputation: Inferior fiction in subliterary media for the lower classes.

Intuitionist Writers Tree

Poe

Melville
- Doyle
  - M. P. Shiel
  - George Sims
- Fergus Hume
  - Baroness Orczy
  - Israel Zangwill: Impossible Crime Pioneer
    - Edgar Wallace
    - Jacques Futrelle
    - Gaston Leroux
    - G.K. Chesterton
      - Agatha Christie
        
        Samuel Spewack
        James Yaffe
      - Jorge Luis Borges
      - John Dickson Carr
        
        Hake Talbot
        Clayton Rawson
        Arthur Porges
        Edward D. Hoch
        Bill Pronzini
    - William Hope Hodgson
    - Weird Menace: Paul Chadwick, G.T. Fleming-Roberts
  - A.A. Milne
  - S.S. Van Dine
    - Anthony Abbot
    - Ellery Queen
      - Anthony Boucher
    - Rex Stout
    - Ngaio Marsh
    - Lillian de la Torre
    - Rufus King
    - Stuart Palmer
    - Craig Rice
    - Clyde B. Clason
    - The Lockridges
      - Kelley Roos
      - Elizabeth Dean

Scientific Detection Tree

Scientific Detection

American Scientific School
- Mary Roberts Rinehart
  - Dorothy Cameron Disney
- HIBK
  - Mignon G. Eberhart
  - Leslie Ford
  - Lenore Glen Offord
- Stratemeyer Syndicate books
R. Austin Freeman
- Freeman Wills Crofts
- Realist School
  - Dashiell Hammett
    - Raymond Chandler
  - George Simenon
- H. C. Bailey
  - Philip MacDonald
  - C.E. Bechhoffer Roberts
  - Anthony Wynne

Please see the much more detailed trees leading from R. Austin Freeman in the article on the Realist School.