SOURCE: Cohen, Michael. “Godwin's Caleb Williams: Showing the Strains in Detective Fiction.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10, no. 2 (January 1998): 203-19.

In the following essay, Cohen discusses Caleb Williams as the precursor of the detective novel, maintaining that inconsistencies within the novel anticipate different strains within the genre.

According to Julian Symons in his Mortal Consequences: A History—From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, “The characteristic note of crime literature is first struck in Caleb Williams.”¹ Symons argues that however ingeniously others mine biblical or classical texts as sources for detective fiction, the genre's characteristic features do not come together before the end of the eighteenth century. William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) “is about a murder, its detection, and the unrelenting pursuit by the murderer of the person who has discovered his guilt.” Moreover, says Symons, Godwin's novel has the crime story's distinctive construction “from effect to cause, from solution to...