History of crime fiction (1839) and Maurits Christopher Hansen's ""Mordet paa Maskinbygger Roolfsen" - The Murder of Engineer Roolfsen" (1839). An example of an early crime/revenge story is the American poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe's (1809–1849) tale "The Cask of Amontillado", published in 1846. Poe created the first fictional detective (a word unknown at the time) in the character of C. Auguste Dupin, as the central character of some of his short stories (which he called "tales of ratiocination"). In the words of William L. De Andrea ("Encyclopedia Mysteriosa", 1994), he One of the early developments started by Poe was the
Detective fiction Detective fiction Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—either professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as speculative fiction and other genre fiction in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained extremely popular, particularly in novels. Some of the most famous heroes of detective fiction include C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Hercule Poirot. Juvenile stories featuring The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and The Boxcar Children have also remained in print for several decades. Some scholars, such as R. H. Pfeiffer,