Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

In the eighteenth year A.P. (After Poe) — in 1863 — two books finally appeared to crack the long silence. One was STRANGE STORIES OF A DETECTIVE; OR, CURIOSITIES OF CRIME, by “a retired member of the detective police,” brought out by Dick & Fitzgerald of New York; the other was THE AMBER GODS AND OTHER STORIES, by Harriet Prescott (Spofford), issued by Ticknor and Fields of Boston, and containing one detective story called “In a Cellar” Two years later, in 1863, Dick & Fitzgerald published LEAVES FROM THE NOTE-BOOK OF A NEW YORK DETECTIVE: THE PRIVATE RECORD OF J.B., written by a Dr. John B. Williams, and containing no less than 22 exploits of detective James Brampton, This book has barely survived the years — have you ever even heard of sleuth James Brampton?

Three volumes in 20 years! Indeed, it may be said that the detective story was born with Poe and almost died with him.

In London the seed of Poe’s noble experiment took firmer root, sprouted, and bore more abundant fruit, Jolted by the appearance in 1830 of four police articles in “Household Words,” a magazine edited by Charles Dickens, English writers heard the knock of Opportunity on their door; for nearly half a century (1850–1896), they spewed forth a spate of detective “reminiscences” As John Carter has pointed out, most of these so-called real-life “diaries” were thinly disguised fiction, written by anonymous and pseudonymous hacks of the day. Immensely popular and literally read to death, these “revelations” vanished into limbo: less than half a hundred different titles remain with us. The survivors include the work of “Waters” (Thomas Russell), Andrew Forrester, Jr., Charles Martel (Thomas Delf), Alfred Hughes, and a few others. Rare today and extremely desirable for historical and collectival reasons, they are nevertheless a purple patch on the CORPUS DETECTIVUS.

But during the 50s and 60s in the United States there was no corresponding flood of pseudo “memoirs,” Over here the “revelations” were to come later — in our lush Dime Novel Era; the first Dime Novel detective, Old Sleuth, did not appear until 1872. From 1845 to 1862 the American detective story lapsed (to coin a word) into biblivion. In all those seventeen years not a single book of detective stories achieved the immortality of cloth, wrappers, or pictorial boards. But what about the many “household” magazines that flourished so romantically in this period? Surely there must have been at least occasional appearances of the detective story in these embryonic “Females’ Home Companions”?