SOURCE: Queen, Ellery. “The Detective Short Story: The First Hundred Years.” In The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Howard Haycraft, pp. 476-91. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946.

In the following essay, Queen provides an overview of the development of the crime-mystery-detective story from the 1840s to the 1940s.

I. Prenatal Note

The first violent crime of literature was a murder, complete with victim, criminal, motive, and—inferentially—weapon; for although Chapter 4 of Genesis merely remarks: “Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him,” we may assume the instrument to have been a forked-stick plow, or a primitive hoe, since it came to pass “when they were in the field,” and Cain, as everyone knows, was “a tiller of the ground.”

This historic fratricide nevertheless cannot be said to have initiated the literature of detection for the profound reason that...