The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction

This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to, and nurtured by, contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst ‘detective fiction’ is almost universally-accepted to have originated in the nineteenth century, a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre’s evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press.

The volume traces how police officers, detectives, criminals, and the criminal justice system were dis...