The conventions of the classical crime fiction genre, conventions that are espoused in Agatha Christie's novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles have been reevaluated and transformed in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, and subverted and stretched in P.D. James' The Skull Beneath the Skin, in response to changing contexts.

The changing cultural mythology of crime fiction has given rise to many different formulas. Edgar Allen Poe first articulated the classical detective story in the 1840's. Its period of greatest popularity was initiated by the enormous success of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories - which established links between the values of a society and the methods and values of its crime solvers which have endured in crime fiction ever since, and flourished in the first four decades of the 20th C - under the likes of writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. It is clear that classical...