Final Essay

When I began to consider topics for my final essay, I was pretty set on doing something on Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. I figured it would be an enjoyable essay to write due to my love for Sherlock Holmes. Eventually, after brainstorming a list of topics, I decided that I wanted to write about Arthur Conan Doyle’s contribution to detective fiction since his character is the most widely known detective in the world. I mostly wanted to focus on how Doyle’s writing style and the elements of his stories were what led to the creation of the genre of detective fiction. However, as I began researching the topic I found that while Doyle’s writing did have an important impact on the genre of detective fiction, Doyle was not the first to employ many

At first, I was in disbelief at how much Poe really had contributed to the genre of detective fiction. I even began to wonder why Doyle’s Sherlock was so much more famous than Poe’s Dupin when Poe was the one who created the amateur detective first. After doing more research on the topic, I eventually came to the same conclusion as many other individuals on the matter: Poe may have created the first real detective fiction stories, but Doyle did it better. At this point of my research, I was almost convinced to once again change my topic back to focus on Doyle, but after hearing so many people in class announce that they were going to do their essay on Doyle, I decided to stick with my topic on Poe. In the end, I was glad that I decided to do my research essay on Poe’s contributions to detective fiction because there was so much to write about and my topic was different from everyone

My definition best suites detective fiction because to me it cannot be detective fiction if it does not have some form of a detective and a puzzle for the readers to solve. Detective fiction must have a detective because without one there would be no one to solve the mystery, so the story would be more about the crime itself. Regardless of whether the detective is an amateur, professional, or just a character that acts like a detective, they still count as a detective if they attempt to solve a mystery. Detective fiction also must provide a case for the readers to solve themselves while reading the story. It is not detective fiction if there are no clues at all for the readers to try and solve the case along with the detective. Not every single clue that the detective mentions when he solves the case must be presented to the readers and the clues do not have to be obvious but there must be a few of them so that the readers can at least take an educated guess at to whom the perpetrator of the crime is. For example, in “The Problem of Cell 13,” the main character is locked into a cell by his own choice to prove to his colleagues that through brainpower alone he can escape. By my own definition of detective