Crime fiction history: everything you wanted to know
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Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. From Agatha Christie's poiro to Benedict Cumberbatch's memorable portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, crime fiction has long been popular. So in today's episode, we're looking at the genre's history and how it has affected attitudes to crime over the years. For this Everything You Wanted to Know episode, Isabel King put your questions to crime writer and expert in the history of crime writing, Martin Edwards. So, Martin, I just want to start with a really basic question of how do you define crime fiction?
Well, Isabel, a basic question, but a a pretty tricky one because so many different books are on the perimeter of the genre that it's hard to come up with an all-encompassing definition that that really works and is yet meaningful. So the way I like to look at it is to think of crime fiction as involving stories where the central focus is on a crime and also on entertaining the reader. And there are many, many individual novels ranging from Dostoevsky and Crime and Punishment, Kafka, The Trial, John Fowles, the collector, and many more that may or may not uh be seen by some people as fitting within crime fiction, but their outliers.
I think that uh entertainment is the key and focus on crime. It's as simple as that. Um, what are the subgenres of crime fiction? Well again, because it's such a very broad church, there are many different uh sub-genres. The classic detective story where you're either a private individual or a representative of the official police, that's one extremely popular genre.
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