9 Fictional Detectives and the Authors Who Created Them

Detective fiction has a long memory. Characters first sketched in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still turn up in new novels, television series and films.

Behind each of them sits a writer with a particular temperament, a few habits of mind, and often a real person or place that shaped the page. Here are nine built them.

Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sherlock Holmes first appeared in the novel A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887. His creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was a Scottish physician, and he has often been said to have modeled Holmes’s observational method partly on his medical teacher Joseph Bell.

Doyle wrote four novels and dozens of short stories about the detective. He famously tried to end the character in “The Final Problem” in 1893, then brought him back after public demand. Few fictional figures have been adapted as often.

Hercule Poirot and Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot, the fastidious Belgian detective, debuted in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was published in 1920. Agatha Christie wrote it after working in a hospital dispensary during the First World War, a background that gave her a working knowledge of poisons.

Poirot went on to appear in dozens of books and stories, ending with Curtain, which Christie wrote decades before its 1975 publication. His method leans on psychology and order rather than physical clues alone.

Miss Marple and Agatha Christie

Jane Marple first appeared in a series of short stories in the late 1920s, before her first novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, in 1930. She is an elderly woman from the village of St Mary Mead, and she solves crimes by comparing them to small human behaviors she has seen at home.

Christie kept her quite different from Poirot. Where he trusts method, Marple trusts her sense of human nature, which makes her a useful study in how a quiet observer can outthink the professionals.

Philip Marlowe and Raymond Chandler

Philip Marlowe arrived in The Big Sleep, published in 1939. Raymond Chandler, who was born in Chicago and raised partly in England, set his private eye in Los Angeles and gave the hard-boiled genre a more literary voice.

Marlowe is cynical but principled, and Chandler’s similes became a trademark of the style. Several novels followed, including Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye, and film versions helped fix the image of the lone investigator in a trench coat.

C. Auguste Dupin and Edgar Allan Poe

Many critics point to Dupin as the earliest modern detective in fiction. He debuted in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published in 1841, and Edgar Allan Poe wrote two more stories featuring him.

Dupin works through logic, often from an armchair, and his companion narrates events. That arrangement was later echoed by Holmes and Watson, and it is one reason Poe is regularly credited with laying the groundwork for the genre.

Lord Peter Wimsey and Dorothy L. Sayers

Lord Peter Wimsey first appeared in Whose Body? in 1923. Dorothy L. Sayers, an Oxford graduate who also worked in advertising, made him an aristocratic amateur with a taste for rare books and a trauma left by the First World War.

Over time Sayers gave the series more emotional depth, especially with the arrival of Harriet Vane, a mystery writer who becomes his partner. Novels such as Gaudy Night are often cited as pushing detective fiction beyond simple puzzles.

Inspector Maigret and Georges Simenon

Jules Maigret, a Paris police commissioner, was created by the Belgian author Georges Simenon. He first appeared in print in the early 1930s, and Simenon went on to write seventy-five novels and several short stories about him.

Maigret rarely relies on dazzling deductions. He tries instead to understand the people and surroundings behind a crime, a patient approach that gives the books a quiet and atmospheric feel.

Inspector Rebus and Ian Rankin

John Rebus first appeared in Knots and Crosses in 1987. Ian Rankin, a Scottish writer, set the series in Edinburgh and used it to explore the darker side of a city better known for its festivals and heritage.

Rebus is a stubborn, music-loving detective who clashes with his superiors. Rankin has continued the series for decades, and he even let the character age and retire in the books before returning him in later novels.

Precious Ramotswe and Alexander McCall Smith

Precious Ramotswe is the founder of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana. Alexander McCall Smith, who was born in what is now Zimbabwe and later became a law professor in Scotland, introduced her in a novel of that name in 1998.

The series is gentler than most crime fiction, with small mysteries and a warm tone. It has grown into a long running collection of books, and it was also adapted for television by the BBC and HBO.