Crime fiction by the Danish author Steen Steensen Blicher, published in 1829. Better known are the earlier dark works of Edgar Allan Poe. His brilliant and eccentric detective C. Auguste Dupin, a forerunner to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, appeared in works such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844). With his Dupin stories, Poe provided the framework for the classic detective story. The detective’s unnamed companion is the narrator of the stories and a prototype for the character of Dr. Watson in later Sherlock Holmes stories. Wilkie Collins' epistolary
Police procedural gathering evidence, search warrants, interrogation and adherence to legal restrictions and procedure. The roots of the police procedural have been traced to at least the mid-1880s. Wilkie Collins's novel "The Moonstone" (1868), a tale of a Scotland Yard detective investigating the theft of a valuable diamond, has been described as perhaps the earliest clear example of the genre. As detective fiction rose to worldwide popularity in the late 1800s and early 1900s, many of the pioneering and most popular characters, at least in the English-speaking world, were private investigators or amateurs. See C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Miss