The rise of crime in fiction
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| Portrait of Arthur William Upfield,
ca. 1930. Austin Murcott Studios. National Library of Australia
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The development of crime fiction as a literary genre coincided with the rise of professional policing during the early part of the 19th century. Prior to that, stories involving crimes lacked the element of investigation and problem solving. Trying to figure out how, and by whom, a particular crime was committed was a new development.
American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809- 1849) is widely considered the father of the murder mystery, though Australia, with it’s origins as a penal colony, had some early pioneers.
John Lang (1816 - 1864) used his knowledge as a lawyer to write several stories set around the seedier side of Sydney life. And in 1865 the popular magazine Australian Journal (edited by an ex-policeman) serialized Force and Fraud by Ellen Davitt.
But it wasn’t until 1886,
when Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of the Hansom Cab, became
an international best seller, that publishers (and writers) began
to take the genre seriously. Set in Melbourne, the book was so
popular it was made into a film in 1911.
Commercial success relied upon the development of mass media in the 1890’s and 1900’s, with magazine publications like Strand and Harper’s. For the first time, writers like Arthur Conan Doyle had a platform to reach a huge audience.
During the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s, — now considered the golden age of the ‘who dunnit’ — English writers such as Agatha Christie, Nicholas Blake and Dorothy L Sayers mastered the form. Coming from the UK, Arthur Upfield saw the scale of popular appeal and seized on the potential of outback Australia as an exotic setting.