This lecture is part of a course from The Great Courses called The Secrets of Great Mystery and Suspense Fiction taught by Professor David Schmid, Ph.D.. This course and over 300 other courses can be accessed with a subscription to The Great Courses Plus.
The detective is the central figure of the mystery and suspense genre. As Professor David Schmid says in this free Great Courses Plus lecture, where crime disrupts, the detective restores order; if crime is an illness, the detective is the doctor. In this lecture on the creation of the Detective, Schmid uses Edgar Allan Poe’s C. August Dupin, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot as examples of how the core traits of the detective were established, and how their comparative differences helped the character type evolve. As Professor Schmid puts it, readers still love detectives because of how they make sense of an often irrational world, and this lecture is a great entry-point for anyone curious about the origins of these beloved creations.