Characteristics of Detective Fiction from Its Inception to the 1920s

The male hard-boiled private eye novel from the 1920s onwards as well as its female modification, emerging in the 1980s, are in the tradition of detective fiction in general, which came into being in America in the nineteenth century. Detective fiction is a unique genre that is distinct from crime fiction (cf. Symons 9). Although literature about crimes and murders can be found in early American literary history abundantly, it was not mainly concerned with the clarification of evidence and cannot be equated with detective fiction.