Armchair detective Armchair detective An armchair detective is a fictional investigator who does not personally visit a crime scene or interview witnesses; instead, he or she either reads the story of the crime in a newspaper or has it recounted by another person. As the armchair detective never sees any of the investigation, the reader can attempt to solve the mystery on the same terms as the detective. The phrase possibly originates in a Sherlock Holmes story from 1893, "The Greek Interpreter", in which Holmes says of his brother Mycroft, "If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from
Detective fiction developed... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?" Ellery Queen is a fictional detective-hero, created by Manfred Bennington Lee (1905-1971), and Frederic Dannay (1905～1982), as well as a joint pseudonym for the cousins Dannay and Lee. Ellery Queen first appeared in "The Roman Hat Mystery" (1929), and was the hero of more than 30 novels and several short story collections, During the 1930s and much of the 1940s, that detective-hero was possibly the best known American fictional detective. Many detectives appear in more than one novel or story. Here is a list of