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...nner (1827) by “Richmond” and Recollections of a Detective Police Officer (c. 1856) by “Waters” (a pseudonym of the journalist William Russell), both of which recounted cases investigated by official detectives. Arguably the first modern detective novel is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's murder mystery The Trail of the Serpent (1861). The hero is wrongfully convicted of murder, so his friends undertake detective work to clear his name and bring the true culprit to justice. The novel features fiction's first disabled detective, a police officer named Peters who is unable to speak and communicates in sign language. His adoptive son, “Sloshy”, is trained from birth to be a detective, and is probably the first child detective in English fiction. Another successful detective novel of this period was Braddon's Eleanor's Victory (1863), featuring an ineffective female amateur detective. More female detectives appeared in 1864 in Andrew Forester's The Female Detective and the anonymous Revelations of a Lady Detective (attributed to W. S. Hayward). In reality, the CID did not employ female detectives until the 1920s, so fiction anticipated reality by some 60 years. One of Victorian Britain's best-selling detective novels was Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), a complex mystery in which a jewel robbery is solved by a police detective, Sergeant Cuff. Detective fiction grew in popularity as the century progressed, with writers such as “Dick Donovan” (J. E. Preston Muddock) gaining a wide audience. In 1886 Australian writer Fergus Hume's detective novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab became a worldwide best-seller. Unfortunately this did not benefit Hume, who had unwisely sold the copyright for a mere £50. 1887 saw the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, but Holmes' real popularity began in 1891 when he appeared in a series of short stories in the popular Strand Magazine. In December 1893 Conan Doyle, who had become heartily sick of his hero, killed Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem. Some 20,000 Strand readers immediately cancelled their subscriptions in protest. Young men working in the city wore black armbands in mourning, and one indignant reader wrote Conan Doyle a letter which began simply, “You brute!”. From the day The Final Problem first appeared, Conan Doyle was under constant pressure to bring Holmes back from the dead. Bowing to popular demand, he reluctantly resurrected his hero a few years later. The success of the Holmes stories spawned a host of imitators. Writers such as Grant Allen, L. T. Meade, Catherine Louisa Pirkis and George Sims wrote series of detective short stories which appeared in magazine and book form. Most of these detectives solved cases by deduction and logic, in the style of Holmes. One notable exception was Baroness Emmuska Orczy's Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910) who solved cases by female intuition. Equally successful was G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, who first appeared in The Innocence of Father Brown (1911). A Catholic priest, Father Brown solves cases by a mixture of deduction, religious insight and plain common sense. His adventures continued well into the 1930s, with the last of the series, The Scandal of Father Brown, published in 1935. After the First World War, British detective fiction entered what has since been referred to as the “Golden Age” which lasted until the Second World War. The leading British crime writers of this period were Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh, sometimes referred to as the four “Queens of Crime”. Nowadays their works are often unfairly referred to as “cosies” because of their tidy solutions and happy endings. Their most popular novels were country house mysteries or crimes set in country villages (jokingly referred to by later critics as “Mayhem Parva”). In 1929 a group of prominent British crime writers formed the Detection Club. Members swore an oath that their detectives: “shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God”. In the same year, Ronald Knox formulated his famous Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction, which are as follows: I. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow; II. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course; III. No more than one secret room or passage is allowable. I would add that a secret passage should not be brought in at all unless the action takes place in the kind of house where such devices might be expected; IV. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end; V. No Chinaman must figure into the story [This was not racism on Knox's part. It was a reference to the frequency with which mysterious Chinamen and opium dens appeared as plot devices.]; VI. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right; VII. The detective must not, himself, commit the crime; VIII. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader; IX. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligenc...