The Black Marble is in the tradition of the mystery novel, where by a combination of skill, luck and guile, the hero-detective solves the case. This genre originated in England with Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). It was continued in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novels and short stories about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Wambaugh's emphasis on the ugliness of the urban scene is also close to that of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the French author of Journey to the End of Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936).