Introduction

Abstract

This book examines crime fiction in the years 1886–1900, a formative and fascinating period in the history of the genre. The 1880s and 1890s have been termed the ‘First Golden Age of Detective Fiction’ (Smith, Golden iii). These were the years in which detective fiction firmly established itself as a genre and sealed its popularity with the reading public.¹ At this time the very first print article to refer to detective fiction as a separate genre was also published. The piece — entitled simply ‘Detective Fiction’ — informed readers that the ‘demand’ for detective fiction was ‘great and increasing’, and that the genre was one of ‘the greatest successes of the day’ (749). Indeed, thousands of detective stories and novels were produced in these years, eagerly consumed by the new mass literate readership brought about by the passing of Forster’s Elementary Education Act in 1870. As a clerk employed at one of London’s many W.H. Smith railway book stalls told an interviewer for the Speaker magazine in 1893, ‘Any detective story, whatever its merits might be, I could sell from morning till night’ (‘A Literary Causerie’ 383).

If the abundance of supply affords any accurate test, the demand for the detective novel is great and increasing. Novels of this class must surely be counted amongst the greatest successes of the day.

‘Detective Fiction.’ Saturday Review 4 Dec. 1886: 749