Mystery Books

Mystery writing became popular in America in the 1830s, with origins in England in the late 1700s. From America, popular names like A.A. Milne and Agatha Christie come immediately to mind for some. For others, more current authors like Stephen King and Mary Higgins Clark are drummed up. Either way, mystery books in the U.S. and abroad have been hugely popular for hundreds of years.

Mystery writing can appeal to all types of people, and throughout time, the different writers have subscribed to different schools of writing. In the 1850s and 1860s in Britain, the Sensationalist Novel was popular. These sorts of works focused on melodrama and suspense between loved ones. Around the same time, writers in France and Britain were catching on to a style called "Casebook Fiction," which consisted of realistic police work stories. Police often made clever deductions based on crime scene evidence and hidden clues.

The Influence of Mystery Writing
Of course, perhaps the most famous casebook fiction work is that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He wrote the wildly popular series, "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes." These novels starred a super detective named Sherlock Holmes, who could seemingly solve any police case put in front of him.

Doyle's popularity in the late 1800s inspired copycat writers, thereby filling the market with this sort of literature and virtually changing the face of mystery writing, as we know it. Even to this day, mystery books center around a protagonist who is generally very clever, able to solve mysteries with little evidence and unrivaled ingenuity.