Although credit for inventing the modern detective story is shared by Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, the formula first took root in Europe and especially England, where a series of heroes resembling Poe’s M. Dupin, an eccentric genius of detection, emerged as the focus of the narrative. But when American writers undertook to write detective romances during the early twentieth century, they found the Sherlock Holmes-figure artificial, so a different version emerged from the pens of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. This hero was a composite of several elements: pulp fiction, which had long sold stories about “tough guys”; frontier stories of heroes conquering the wild west; and the macho protagonist …
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Citation: Dougherty, David C.. "Laura Lippman". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 December 2011 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13048, accessed 23 November 2024.]
