SOURCE: Knight, Stephen. “‘… Some Men Come Up’—The Detective Appears.” In The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, edited by Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe, pp. 267-98. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

In the following essay, Knight traces the origins and development of the modern crime-mystery-detective story.

At the center of modern crime fiction stands an investigating agent—an amateur detective, a professional but private investigator, a single policeman, a police force acting together. Specially skilled people discover the cause of a crime, restore order, and bring the criminal to account. This function has been so important in recent crime stories that two well-known analysts sought the history of the genre in detection from the past. Régis Messac goes back to the classics and the Bible for his earlier examples in his enormous book Le “Detective Novel” et l'influence de la pensée...