Conclusion

Abstract

This study has sought to augment recent challenges to reductive and essentialist accounts of both the genealogy and the complexity of the crime genre in the period before, during and after the emergence of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. By focusing on Doyle’s detective stories, alongside other well-known fiction by Robert Louis Stevenson, and works by critically neglected authors like Arthur Morrison, Israel Zangwill, Fergus Hume and Guy Boothby, we have seen the divergent possibilities of crime writing at the time when it was just becoming a popular and self-conscious genre. As early as the 1880s, the nascent detective genre frequently surprises and challenges the reader — with partial, problematic or limited resolutions to the crimes it portrayed, with stories where detectives are absent, implicated in the crime, or unsuccessful, or where criminals take centre stage, escape or emerge as heroes. In this study, then, the fascinating — but often overlooked — formal and ideological scope of the late Victorian crime genre has begun to be uncovered.