Detective fiction is a branch of crime fiction in which a detective (or detectives), either professional or amateur, investigates a crime, often murder. Detective fiction is a popular form of both mystery fiction and hardboiled crime fiction.
Commonly in detective fiction, the investigator has some source of income other than detective work and some undesirable eccentricities or striking characteristics. He or she frequently has a funny and capab...
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Detective fiction is a branch of crime fiction in which a detective (or detectives), either professional or amateur, investigates a crime, often murder. Detective fiction is a popular form of both mystery fiction and hardboiled crime fiction.
Commonly in detective fiction, the investigator has some source of income other than detective work and some undesirable eccentricities or striking characteristics. He or she frequently has a funny and capable assistant, who is the comic relief in the story. (or foil) who acts as an audience surrogate for the explanation of the mystery at the end of the story.
The earliest known example of a detective story was "The Three Apples", one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). In this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy locked chest along the Tigris river and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who then has the chest broken open only to find inside it the dead body of a young woman...
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