Home - Where you will find out more about mystery novels, find new authors, and learn about some really great older ones.

A Chronology of Mystery Firsts

This chronology is of the dates of publication of first novels and short story collections by noted writers of mystery fiction and of other events of significance in the development of the mystery novel.

1603 - The Tokugawa shogunate establishes samurai police in Japan.

1674 - The publication of the proceedings of Old Bailey, London's central criminal court.

1749 - The Bow Street Runners was established in London by Henry Fielding.

1798 - The Thames River (Marine) Police was established in London. This was a force of professional, paid policemen. Victorian woman writing

1800 - The Paris Prefecture of Police was established.

1828 - Memoirs by Eugene Francois Vidocq - Expert detective, head of the French police, and prototype of many fictional detectives.

1829 - The formation of the London Metropolitan police department.

1830's - The first publication of the penny dreadfuls.

1834 - Vidocq established Le Bureau de Reseignments, the first private detective agency.

1835 - Ballistic Fingerprinting - was first used to identify guns from the bullets they fired.

1836 - James Marsh developed the Marsh Test - for the detection of arsenic. The beginning of the science of forensic chemistry.

1841 - The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe

1842 - The Detective Division of the London Metropolitan Police was established.

1850 - Allan Pinkerton founded Pinkerton's National Detective Agency.

1853 - Bleak House by Charles Dickens. First appearance of a detective in an English novel.

1860 - The first dime novel is published by Beadle and Adams. Publication contined until 1901.

1860 - The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

1862 - Lady Audley's Secret - M. E. Braddon

1864 - The Notting Hill Mystery - by Charles Felix which may be the pseudonym of Charles Warren Adams. Many consider this book to be the first true detective novel.

1864 - The Female Detective by Andrew Forrester, and The Revelations of a Lady Detective by W. S. Hayward. These two books contend to be the first appearance of a woman detective.

1866 - The Widow Lerouge by Emile Gaboriau

1886 - The Mystery of the Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume.

1873 - The Royal Canadian Mounted Police began.

1878 - The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katherine Green

1887 - A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle. The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes.

1887 - Expiation by E. Phillips Oppenheim

1888 - The first murders attributed to Jack the Ripper

1890 - Alphonse Bertillon develops a system of classifying criminals based on body measurements.

1891 - The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill. The first locked room mystery.

1892 - Eduardo Alvarez, police inspector in Buenos Aires, was the first to identify a murderer by using a bloody fingerprint left at the scene of a crime. Fingerprint information.

1894 - Martin Hewitt Investigator by Arthur Morrison

1894 - The Experiences of Loveday Brooke: Lady Detective by C(atherine) L(ouisa) Pirkis. The first appearance of a woman detective written by a woman.

1899 - The Amateur Cracksman by E. W. Hornung.

1903 - The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers. Maybe not the first spy novel, but the one which was most influential on later writers.

1905 - The Problem of Cell 13 by Jacques Futrelle

1907 - The Red Thumb Mark by R. Austin Freeman

1908 - The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart

1908 - The Mystery of the Yellow Room - by Gaston Leroux. The first mystery in which the person investigating the crime is the murderer.

1909 - The British Secret Service was formed. It is the precursor of MI-5

1909 - The Clue by Carolyn Wells.

1910 - The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton

1913 - Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley. This book has been cited as the first book of the Golden Age of Mystery fiction.