SOURCE: Priestman, Martin. “The Detective Whodunnit from Poe to World War I.” In Crime Fiction: From Poe to the Present, pp. 5-18. Plymouth, England: Northcote House, 1998.

In the following essay, Priestman provides an overview of the development of the crime-mystery-detective story from the 1840s to World War I.

The detective whodunnit focuses primarily on identifying the perpetrator of a crime which for most of the story or novel already lies in the past. As Tsvetan Todorov has pointed out in his useful essay ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, this placing of the major event in a concealed ‘first story’ which has taken place prior to most of the narrated action compels the ‘second story’ of the latter to be relatively static, focusing our attention on a slow process of uncovering (and sometimes on the practical difficulties of narrative itself), rather than on any very meaningful or character-revealing action...