Detective fiction the Detective. In short, it is difficult to establish who was the first to write the English-language detective novel, as various authors were exploring the theme simultaneously. In 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, arguably the most famous of all fictional detectives. Although Sherlock Holmes is not the original fiction detective (he was influenced by Poe's Dupin and Gaboriau's Lecoq), his name has become a byword for the part. Conan Doyle stated that the character of Holmes was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, for whom Doyle had worked as a clerk at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Like Holmes, Bell
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