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Write a note on Detective novel.

The detective novel has already been related to public interest in the problems of modern, urban life, particularly in crime. But crime as a fature of western social life was not generally recognized until the rise of large cities in the early 1800s, a period that corresponds to the creation of mass reading public. Fasinated by an afraid of crime, no city dwellers vilified and romanticized crimianls, as well as those who fought them.

The first writing on urban crime pretended to be documentary, but it was filled with archetype and plots from preceding fiction, particularly the gothic novel. The idea of detection and the figure of the detective that would eventually stand at the centre of the genere were introduced in the early nineteenth century by French man Francos Elugene Vidocq in this Memoires of Vidocq. Having served as soldier, privatrs, Smuggler, inmate and secret police spy, Vidocq at age twenty four credited himself with duel for every year of his life. When Vidocqu’s memories were published in France in 1828, they were immediatey popular and translated into English. Honore De Balzac modeleed the character Voutrin in Le Pere Goriot (1833) and Victor Hugo did the same with Jean Viayean in Les Miserables (1862).

In England, interest in ‘Crime stories’ belended with a strong, existing genre called the gothic novels. The most scholars attribute this genre to Horace Walpole, whose castle of Otranto, published in 1765, established the horror story to which Mary shelly added scientific aspects with Frankensten in 1818. The gothic influence is said to account for the dark setting, unfathomable molivations and preoccupation with brilliant or unexpected solutions in the detective/mystery genere. Among English writers Vidoeq most influenced Charles Dickens, who used details and characters from Videq’s Memoirs for his Great Expectations.

In United States, Edgar Allan Poe read Dickens and vidoeq and inspired much in detective literature. Between 1940 to 1945, he wrote five stories which were considered on of the best detective stories. In Murders in the Rue Morgue”, Poe introduced this brilliant eccentric detective, Auguste Dupin, whose solutions were chronicled by an admiring, amiable narrator. Later detectives, nolabley Aurthur Conan Dyle’s Sher lock homes, became even more eccentric and Poe’s mameless narratos has his counter part in the animable Dr. Watson. In “Rue Morgue” Poe introduced three common motifs of detective fiction, the wrongly suspected man, the crime in locked room and solution by unexpected means. Dupin solved the crime by reading the evidence better than the Police did and by noticing clues that they had neglected thus highlighting the importance of inference and observation.