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66-427: The Black Curtain is a mystery novel written by Cornell Woolrich . The book was initially published in 1941 by Simon and Schuster . The story concerns a man with amnesia, named Frank Townsend. He cannot remember anything from the previous three years of his life. As it turns out, he may be a suspected murderer. He struggles to find a loophole in the overwhelming evidence. There has been one cinematic adaptation of

132-438: A supernatural mystery in which the solution does not have to be logical and even in which there is no crime involved. This usage was common in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, whose titles such as Dime Mystery , Thrilling Mystery , and Spicy Mystery offered what were then described as complicated to solve and weird stories: supernatural horror in the vein of Grand Guignol . That contrasted with parallel titles of

198-461: A crime scene with no indication as to how the intruder could have entered or left, i.e., a locked room. Following other conventions of classic detective fiction, the reader is normally presented with the puzzle and all of the clues, and is encouraged to solve the mystery before the solution is revealed in a dramatic climax. Dime novel In 1860, the publishers Erastus and Irwin Beadle released

264-406: A division of Crosstown Publications. The detective fiction author Ellery Queen ( pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee ) is also credited with continuing interest in mystery fiction. Interest in mystery fiction continues to this day partly because of various television shows which have used mystery themes and the many juvenile and adult novels which continue to be published. There

330-400: A higher-grade stock. They reprinted multiple stories from the five- and ten-cent weeklies, often slightly rewritten to tie them together. All dime-novel publishers were canny about reusing and refashioning material, but Street & Smith excelled at it. They developed the practice of publishing four consecutive, related tales of, for example, Nick Carter, in the weekly magazine, then combining

396-519: A mystery to be solved, clues , red herrings , some plot twists along the way and a detective denouement , but differs on several points. Most of the Sherlock Holmes stories feature no suspects at all, while mystery fiction, in contrast, features a large number of them. As noted, detective stories feature professional and retired detectives, while mystery fiction almost exclusively features amateur detectives. Finally, detective stories focus on

462-595: A new angle on the investigation, so as to bring about a final outcome different from the one originally devised by the investigators. In the legal thriller, court proceedings play a very active, if not to say decisive part in a case reaching its ultimate solution. Erle Stanley Gardner popularized the courtroom novel in the 20th century with his Perry Mason series. Contemporary authors of legal thrillers include Michael Connelly , Linda Fairstein , John Grisham , John Lescroart , Paul Levine , Lisa Scottoline and Scott Turow . Many detective stories have police officers as

528-520: A new series of cheap paperbacks, Beadle's Dime Novels . Dime novel became a general term for similar paperbacks produced by various publishers in the early twentieth century. The first book in the Beadle series was Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter , by Ann S. Stephens , dated June 9, 1860. The novel was essentially a reprint of Stephens's earlier serial, which had appeared in

594-418: A night watchman at best. Naturally, the constable would be aware of every individual in the town, and crimes were either solved quickly or left unsolved entirely. As people began to crowd into cities, police forces became institutionalized, and the need for detectives was realized – thus the mystery novel arose. An early work of modern mystery fiction, Das Fräulein von Scuderi by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1819),

660-419: A serious rival to the soon-to-be-popular Frank Merriwell), Secret Service , Pluck and Luck , Wild West Weekly , Fame and Fortune Weekly , and The Liberty Boys of '76 , each of which issued over a thousand copies weekly. Street & Smith had New Nick Carter Weekly , Tip Top Weekly , Buffalo Bill Stories , Jesse James Stories , Brave & Bold Weekly and many others. The Tousey stories were generally

726-450: A sociological bent, exploring the meaning of his characters' places in society and the impact society had on people. Full of commentary and clipped prose, his books were more intimate than those of his predecessors, dramatizing that crime can happen in one's own living room. The PI novel was a male-dominated field in which female authors seldom found publication until Marcia Muller , Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton were finally published in

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792-455: A solution achieved by intellect or intuition rather than police procedure, with order restored in the end, honorable characters, and a setting in a closed community. The murders are often committed by less violent tools such as poison and the wounds inflicted are rarely if ever used as clues. The writers who innovated and popularized the genre include Agatha Christie , Dorothy L. Sayers and Elizabeth Daly . The legal thriller or courtroom novel

858-402: A weekly in a smaller format with muted colors. Such titles as New Nick Carter Weekly (continuing the original black-and-white Nick Carter Library ), Tip-Top Weekly (introducing Frank Merriwell ) and others were 7 x 10 inches with thirty-two pages of text, but the 8.5 x 11 Tousey format carried the day, and Street & Smith soon followed suit. The price was also dropped to five cents, making

924-433: A weekly schedule. They are perhaps best described as the television of their day, containing a variety of serial stories and articles, with something aimed at each member of the family, and often illustrated profusely with woodcuts. Popular story papers included The Saturday Journal , Young Men of America , Golden Weekly , Golden Hours , Good News , and Happy Days . Most of the stories in dime novels stood alone, but in

990-447: Is also related to detective fiction. The system of justice itself is always a major part of these works, at times almost functioning as one of the characters. In this way, the legal system provides the framework for the legal thriller as much as the system of modern police work does for the police procedural. The legal thriller usually starts its business with the court proceedings following the closure of an investigation, often resulting in

1056-494: Is an example) to 8.5 x 12 ( New York Detective Library ). The Old Cap Collier Library was issued in both sizes and also in booklet form. Each issue tended to feature a single story, unlike the story papers, and many of them were devoted to a single character. Frontier stories, evolving into westerns, were still popular, but the new vogue tended to urban crime stories. One of the most successful titles, Frank Tousey 's New York Detective Library eventually came to alternate stories of

1122-471: Is often a detective (such as Sherlock Holmes ), who eventually solves the mystery by logical deduction from facts presented to the reader. Some mystery books are non-fiction . Mystery fiction can be detective stories in which the emphasis is on the puzzle or suspense element and its logical solution such as a whodunit . Mystery fiction can be contrasted with hardboiled detective stories, which focus on action and gritty realism. Mystery fiction can involve

1188-603: Is one of the first examples of the modern style of fictional private detective. This character is described as an "'Everyman' detective meant to challenge the detective-as-superman that Holmes represented." By the late 1920s, Al Capone and the Mob were inspiring not only fear, but piquing mainstream curiosity about the American crime underworld. Popular pulp fiction magazines like Black Mask capitalized on this, as authors such as Carrol John Daly published violent stories that focused on

1254-422: Is some overlap with "thriller" or "suspense" novels and authors in those genres may consider themselves mystery novelists. Comic books and graphic novels have carried on the tradition, and film adaptations or the even-more-recent web-based detective series, have helped to re-popularize the genre in recent times. Though the origins of the genre date back to ancient literature and One Thousand and One Nights ,

1320-521: The New York Weekly . Frank Reade, the Old Sleuth and Nick Carter had their own ten-cent weekly titles within a few years. In 1873, the house of Beadle & Adams introduced a new ten-cent format, 9 by 13.25 inches (229 mm × 337 mm), with only 32 pages and a black-and-white illustration on the cover, under the title New and Old Friends . It was not a success, but the format

1386-598: The English Renaissance and, as people began to read over time, they became more individualistic in their thinking. As people became more individualistic in their thinking, they developed a respect for human reason and the ability to solve problems. Perhaps a reason that mystery fiction was unheard of before the 19th century was due in part to the lack of true police forces. Before the Industrial Revolution , many towns would have constables and

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1452-524: The Ladies' Companion magazine in February, March and April 1839. It sold more than 65,000 copies in the first few months after its publication as a dime novel. Dime novels varied in size, even in the first Beadle series, but were mostly about 6.5 by 4.25 inches (16.5 by 10.8 cm), with 100 pages. The first 28 were published without a cover illustration, in a salmon-colored paper wrapper. A woodblock print

1518-409: The "deduction" of Sherlock Holmes, who was disparagingly included in some Lupin stories under obvious pseudonyms. The genre began to expand near the turn of the century with the development of dime novels and pulp magazines . Books were especially helpful to the genre, with many authors writing in the genre in the 1920s. An important contribution to mystery fiction in the 1920s was the development of

1584-489: The James Gang with stories of Old King Brady, detective, and (in a rare occurrence in the dime novel) several stories which featured both, with Old King Brady doggedly on the trail of the vicious gang. The competition was fierce, and publishers were always looking for an edge. Once again, color came into play when Frank Tousey introduced a weekly with brightly colored covers in 1896. Street & Smith countered by issuing

1650-632: The Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937), and the world's best-selling mystery And Then There Were None (1939). The massive popularity of pulp magazines in the 1930s and 1940s increased interest in mystery fiction. Pulp magazines decreased in popularity in the 1950s with the rise of television , so much that the numerous titles available then are reduced to two today: Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine —both now published by Dell Magazines ,

1716-401: The arts: only it must be acknowledged that they cultivate them after their own fashion, and bring to the task their own peculiar qualifications and deficiencies." He found that in aristocratic societies education and interest in literature were confined to a small upper class, and that the literary class would arrive at a "sort of aristocratic jargon, ... hardly less remote from pure language than

1782-436: The best-selling author Michael Connelly,"Chandler credited Hammett with taking the mystery out of the drawing-room and putting it out on the street where it belongs." In the late 1930s, Raymond Chandler updated the form with his private detective Philip Marlowe , who brought a more intimate voice to the detective than the more distanced "operative's report" style of Hammett's Continental Op stories. Despite struggling through

1848-502: The crime scene. The genre was established in the 19th century. Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is considered the first locked-room mystery; since then, other authors have used the scheme. John Dickson Carr was recognized as a master of the genre and his The Hollow Man was recognized by a panel of 17 mystery authors and reviewers as the best locked-room mystery of all time in 1981. The crime in question typically involves

1914-410: The crime. In the 1940s the police procedural evolved as a new style of detective fiction. Unlike the heroes of Christie, Chandler, and Spillane, the police detective was subject to error and was constrained by rules and regulations. As Gary Huasladen says in his book Places for Dead Bodies , "not all the clients were insatiable bombshells, and invariably there was life outside the job." The detective in

1980-533: The detective and how the crime was solved, while mystery fiction concentrates on the identity of the culprit and how the crime was committed, a distinction that separated And Then There Were None from other works of Agatha Christie . A common subgenre of detective fiction is the Whodunit . Whodunits experienced an increase in popularity during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction of the 1920s-1940s, when it

2046-459: The detective's attempt to solve the mystery. There may also be subsidiary puzzles, such as why the crime was committed, and they are explained or resolved during the story. This format is the inversion of the more typical "whodunit", where all of the details of the perpetrator of the crime are not revealed until the story's climax. Martin Hewitt , created by British author Arthur Morrison in 1894,

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2112-422: The early 20th century, many credit Ellis Peters 's The Cadfael Chronicles (1977–1994) for popularizing what would become known as the historical mystery. The locked-room mystery is a subgenre of detective fiction. The crime—almost always murder—is committed in circumstances under which it was seemingly impossible for the perpetrator to commit the crime and/or evade detection in the course of getting in and out of

2178-496: The end of the war, numerous competitors, such as George Munro and Robert DeWitt, were crowding the field, distinguishing their product only by title and the color of the paper wrappers. Beadle & Adams had their own alternate "brands", such as the Frank Starr line. As a whole, the quality of the fiction was derided by highbrow critics, and the term dime novel came to refer to any form of cheap, sensational fiction, rather than

2244-425: The first series. Like its predecessor, Beadle's New Dime Novels ran for 321 issues, until 1885. Much of the content of dime novels came from story papers , which were weekly, eight-page newspaper-like publications, varying in size from tabloid to full-size newspaper format and usually costing five or six cents. They started in the mid-1850s and were immensely popular, some titles being issued for over fifty years on

2310-483: The form again with his detective Lew Archer . Archer, like Hammett's fictional heroes, was a camera eye, with hardly any known past. "Turn Archer sideways, and he disappears," one reviewer wrote. Two of Macdonald's strengths were his use of psychology and his beautiful prose, which was full of imagery. Like other 'hardboiled' writers, Macdonald aimed to give an impression of realism in his work through violence, sex and confrontation. The 1966 movie Harper starring Paul Newman

2376-597: The four stories into one edition of the related thick-book series, in this instance, the New Magnet Library . The Frank Merriwell stories appeared in the Medal, New Medal and Merriwell libraries, Buffalo Bill in the Buffalo Bill Library and Far West Library , and so on. The thick books were still in print as late as the 1930s but carry the copyright date of the original story, often as early as

2442-423: The genre. True crime is a literary genre that recounts real crimes committed by real people, almost half focusing on serial killers . Criticized by many as being insensitive to those personally acquainted with the incidents, it is often categorized as trash culture . Having basis on reality, it shares more similarities with docufiction than the mystery genre. Unlike fiction of the kind, it does not focus much on

2508-578: The identity of the culprit and has no red herrings or clues, but often emphasizes how the culprit was caught and their motivations behind their actions. Cozy mysteries began in the late 20th century as a reinvention of the Golden Age whodunit; these novels generally shy away from violence and suspense and frequently feature female amateur detectives. Modern cozy mysteries are frequently, though not necessarily in either case, humorous and thematic. This genre features minimal violence, sex and social relevance,

2574-537: The juvenile mystery by Edward Stratemeyer . Stratemeyer originally developed and wrote the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries written under the Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene pseudonyms respectively (and were later written by his daughter, Harriet Adams , and other authors). The 1920s also gave rise to one of the most popular mystery authors of all time, Agatha Christie , whose works include Murder on

2640-528: The late 1880s series characters began to appear and quickly grew in popularity. The original Frank Reade stories first appeared in Boys of New York . The Old Sleuth, appearing in The Fireside Companion story paper beginning in 1872, was the first dime-novel detective and began the trend away from the western and frontier stories that dominated the story papers and dime novels up to that time. He

2706-438: The late 1970s and early 1980s. Each author's detective, also female, was brainy and physical and could hold her own. Their acceptance, and success, caused publishers to seek out other female authors. These works are set in a time period considered historical from the author's perspective, and the central plot involves the solving of a mystery or crime (usually murder). Though works combining these genres have existed since at least

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2772-426: The late nineteenth century, leading some dealers and new collectors today to erroneously assume they have original dime novels when the books are only distantly related. In 1896, Frank Munsey had converted his juvenile magazine Argosy into a fiction magazine for adults, the first of the pulp magazines. By the turn of the century, new high-speed printing techniques combined with cheaper pulp paper allowed him to drop

2838-447: The magazines more accessible to children. This would be the last major permutation of the product before it evolved into pulp magazines. Ironically, for many years it has been the nickel weeklies that most people refer to when using the term dime novel . The nickel weeklies were popular, and their numbers grew quickly. Frank Tousey and Street & Smith dominated the field. Tousey had his "big six": Work and Win (featuring Fred Fearnot,

2904-447: The main characters. These stories may take a variety of forms, but many authors try to realistically depict the routine activities of a group of police officers who are frequently working on more than one case simultaneously, providing a stark contrast to the detective-as-superhero archetype of Sherlock Holmes. Some of these stories are whodunits; in others, the criminal is known, and the police must gather enough evidence to charge them with

2970-453: The mayhem and injustice surrounding the criminals, not the circumstances behind the crime. Very often, no actual mystery even existed: the books simply revolved around justice being served to those who deserved harsh treatment, which was described in explicit detail." The overall theme these writers portrayed reflected "the changing face of America itself." In the 1930s, the private eye genre was adopted wholeheartedly by American writers. One of

3036-516: The modern detective story as it is known today was invented by Edgar Allan Poe in the mid-19th century through his short story, " The Murders in the Rue Morgue ", which featured arguably the world's first fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin . However, detective fiction was popularized only later, in the late 19th century, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's Sherlock Holmes stories, considered milestones in crime fiction . The detective story shares some similarities with mystery fiction in that it also has

3102-426: The more lurid and sensational of the two. Perhaps the most confusing of the various formats lumped together under the term dime novel are the so-called "thick-book" series, most of which were published by Street & Smith, J. S. Ogilvie and Arthur Westbrook. These books were published in series, contained roughly 150 to 200 pages, and were 4.75 by 7 inches (121 mm × 178 mm), often with color covers on

3168-408: The novel, one on radio, and one much later done for television Mystery novel Mystery is a fiction genre where the nature of an event, usually a murder or other crime, remains mysterious until the end of the story. Often within a closed circle of suspects, each suspect is usually provided with a credible motive and a reasonable opportunity for committing the crime. The central character

3234-399: The novelty of color to the covers when their New Dime Novels series replaced the flagship title. The New Dime Novels were issued with a dual numbering system on the cover, one continuing the numbering from the first series and the second and more prominent one indicating the number in the current series; for example, the first issue was numbered 1 (322). The stories were mostly reprints from

3300-416: The passions more than to charm the taste." Written twenty-five years prior to the emergence of the dimes, his words read like an exact anticipation of their main characteristics. Adding to the general confusion as to what is or is not a dime novel, many of the series, though similar in design and subject, cost ten (a dime ) to fifteen cents. Beadle & Adams complicated the matter by issuing some titles in

3366-417: The police procedural does the things police officers do to catch a criminal. Writers of the genre include Ed McBain , P. D. James and Bartholomew Gill . An inverted detective story, also known as a "howcatchem", is a plot structure of murder mystery fiction in which the commission of the crime is shown or described at the beginning, usually including the identity of the perpetrator. The story then describes

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3432-493: The price from twenty-five cents to ten cents, and sales of the magazine took off. In 1910, Street and Smith converted two of their nickel weeklies, New Tip Top Weekly and Top Notch Magazine , into pulps; in 1915, Nick Carter Stories , itself a replacement for the New Nick Carter Weekly , became Detective Story Magazine , and in 1919, New Buffalo Bill Weekly became Western Story Magazine . Harry Wolff,

3498-499: The primary contributors to this style was Dashiell Hammett with his famous private investigator character, Sam Spade . His style of crime fiction came to be known as "hardboiled", which is described as a genre that "usually deals with criminal activity in a modern urban environment, a world of disconnected signs and anonymous strangers." "Told in stark and sometimes elegant language through the unemotional eyes of new hero-detectives, these stories were an American phenomenon." According to

3564-406: The same names which contained conventional hardboiled crime fiction. The first use of "mystery" in that sense was by Dime Mystery , which started out as an ordinary crime fiction magazine but switched to " weird menace " during the later part of 1933. The genre of mystery novels is a young form of literature that has developed since the early 19th century. The rise of literacy began in the years of

3630-829: The same salmon-colored covers at different prices. Also, there were a number of ten-cent, paper-covered books of the period that featured medieval romance stories and melodramatic tales. This makes it hard to define what falls in the category of the dime novel, with classification depending on format, price, or style of material. Examples of dime novel series that illustrate the diversity of the form include Bunce's Ten Cent Novels , Brady's Mercury Stories , Beadle's Dime Novels , Irwin P. Beadle's Ten Cent Stories , Munro's Ten Cent Novels , Dawley's Ten Penny Novels , Fireside Series , Chaney's Union Novels , DeWitt's Ten Cent Romances , Champion Novels , Frank Starr's American Novels , Ten Cent Novelettes , Richmond's Sensation Novels , and Ten Cent Irish Novels . In 1874, Beadle & Adams added

3696-573: The specific format. Nonetheless, the pocket-sized sea, Western, railway, circus, gold-digger, and other adventures were an instant success. Author Armin Jaemmrich observes that Alexis de Tocqueville 's thesis in Democracy in America (1835) says that in democratic and socially permeable societies, like that of the U.S., the lower classes were not "naturally indifferent to science, literature, and

3762-551: The story papers and other sources, but many were original stories. As the popularity of dime novels increased, original stories came to be the norm. The books were reprinted many times, sometimes with different covers, and the stories were often further reprinted in different series and by different publishers. The literacy rate increased around the time of the American Civil War , and Beadle's Dime Novels were immediately popular among young, working-class readers. By

3828-532: The successor in interest to the Frank Tousey titles, continued to reprint many of them into the mid-1920s, most notably Secret Service, Pluck and Luck, Fame and Fortune and Wild West Weekly . These two series were purchased by Street & Smith in 1926 and converted into pulp magazines the following year, effectively ending the era of the dime novel. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, collecting dime novels became popular, and prices soared. Even at that time,

3894-740: The task of plotting a story, his cadenced dialogue and cryptic narrations were musical, evoking the dark alleys and tough thugs, rich women and powerful men about whom he wrote. Several feature and television movies have been made about the Philip Marlowe character. James Hadley Chase wrote a few novels with private eyes as the main heroes, including Blonde's Requiem (1945), Lay Her Among the Lilies (1950), and Figure It Out for Yourself (1950). The heroes of these novels are typical private eyes, very similar to or plagiarizing Raymond Chandler's work. Ross Macdonald, pseudonym of Kenneth Millar , updated

3960-421: Was added in issue 29, and the first 28 were reprinted with illustrated covers. The books were priced, of course, at ten cents. This series ran for 321 issues and established almost all the conventions of the genre, from the lurid and outlandish story to the melodramatic double titling used throughout the series, which ended in the 1920s. Most of the stories were frontier tales reprinted from the numerous serials in

4026-585: Was an influence on The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe (1841) as may have been Voltaire 's Zadig (1747). Wilkie Collins ' novel The Woman in White was published in 1860, while The Moonstone (1868) is often thought to be his masterpiece. In 1887 Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes , whose mysteries are said to have been singularly responsible for the huge popularity in this genre. In 1901 Maurice Leblanc created gentleman burglar, Arsène Lupin , whose creative imagination rivaled

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4092-541: Was based on the first Lew Archer story The Moving Target (1949). Newman reprised the role in The Drowning Pool in 1976. Michael Collins, pseudonym of Dennis Lynds , is generally considered the author who led the form into the Modern Age. His private investigator, Dan Fortune, was consistently involved in the same sort of David-and-Goliath stories that Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald wrote, but Collins took

4158-467: Was so much cheaper to produce that they tried again in 1877 with The Fireside Library and Frank Starr's New York Library . The first reprinted English love stories, the second contained hardier material, but both titles caught on. Publishers were no less eager to follow a new trend then than now. Soon the newsstands were flooded by ten-cent weekly "libraries". These publications also varied in size, from as small as 7 x 10 inches ( The Boy's Star Library

4224-670: Was the coarse dialect of the people." According to Tocqueville, due to the heterogeneity of its population, the situation in the U.S. was different, and people were asking for reading matter. Since, in his view, practically every American was busy earning a living with no time for obtaining a higher education let alone for timeconsuming distractions, they preferred books which "may be easily procured, quickly read, and which require no learned researches to be understood ... they require rapid emotions, startling passages .... Small productions will be more common than bulky books ... The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir

4290-413: Was the first character to use the word sleuth to denote a detective, the word's original definition being that of a bloodhound trained to track. He is also responsible for the popularity of the use of the word old in the names of competing dime novel detectives, such as Old Cap Collier, Old Broadbrim, Old King Brady, Old Lightning, and Old Ferret, among many others. Nick Carter first appeared in 1886 in

4356-399: Was the primary style of detective fiction. This subgenre is classified as a detective story where the reader is given clues throughout as to who the culprit is, giving the reader the opportunity to solve the crime before it is revealed. During the Golden Age, whodunits were written primarily by women, however Wilkie Collins ' The Moonstone is often recognized as one of the first examples of

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