ABSTRACT
In 1928, Dorothy L. Sayers compiled a collection of short detective stories and concluded her introductory essay by celebrating the status and quality of detective fiction at that time. The period between the wars, when the crime story became a major popular genre, has come to be known as the Golden Age of detective fiction. In fact, the detective novel sprang from a range of different backgrounds and produced diverse detectives and differing ideologies of detection. Poe's Paris-based stories show an austere and remote detective whereas Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is a flamboyant figure involved in sensational plots. Painstaking detective work is significantly absent: when the crime has been committed, 'some men come up' and immediately identify and seize the culprit. Romanticism, rationalism, and individualism within bourgeois society are, then, the conditions in which the detective genre came to birth and they provide its core ideology.
