ABSTRACT
The general critical consensus is that the detective story begins with Edgar Allan Poe, the ‘father’ of the detective genre. Crime fiction, however, of which Poe’s detective stories form a subset, has a much earlier provenance, and in order to understand contemporary attitudes to crime, and to narratives of crime, it is necessary to outline the origins of the genre. Dorothy L. Sayers, author of a series of novels featuring the muchimitated, and frequently parodied, Lord Peter Wimsey, in her 1928 introduction to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror, published in 1929 in the United States as the first Omnibus of Crime, identifies four stories as early ancestors of the genre: two Old Testament
stories, dating from the fourth to the first century BC, from the book of Daniel, one story from Herodotus, dating from the fifth century BC, and one story drawn from the Hercules myths.
