Free Mystery Books Online

Mystery and detective fiction is a genre with a startlingly precise origin. Unlike most literary categories, which emerged gradually from older traditions, detective fiction can be traced almost exactly to a specific writer and a specific story: Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841, which introduced the world to C. Auguste Dupin, the first great analytical detective in English literature. Every mystery novel written since — every Sherlock Holmes story, every Agatha Christie puzzle, every twenty-first-century police procedural — is in some way a descendant of what Poe invented in that one short story.

The Book Renzo mystery shelf features two of the writers who defined the genre in its foundational years.

The first is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, first published as a collection in 1892. Holmes was not the first fictional detective, but he was the one who fixed the archetype in the popular imagination so completely that every subsequent detective character has been measured against him. Holmes is brilliant, eccentric, socially difficult, and possessed of powers of observation that seem almost supernatural until Doyle patiently explains them. His partnership with Dr. John Watson — the narrator of most of the stories, and the ordinary intelligent man against whom Holmes's genius is measured — is one of the most influential character pairings in literary history. Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes over roughly forty years, and the best of them are as sharp and satisfying today as they were when they were first published in The Strand Magazine in the 1890s.

The second is Edgar Allan Poe, whose small handful of Dupin stories founded the analytical-detective tradition that Doyle inherited. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, and The Purloined Letter established almost every convention modern detective fiction still relies on: the brilliant amateur detective who solves crimes the police cannot; the ordinary narrator who serves as the reader's stand-in; the "locked-room" mystery structure; the emphasis on ratiocination — Poe's own word for the process of reasoning from evidence to conclusion. Poe wrote only a few Dupin stories, but their influence is disproportionate to their number. Doyle acknowledged Dupin as a direct precursor to Holmes.

Between them, Poe and Doyle built the foundations of everything that came after. We're continuing to expand this shelf toward the other great writers of the classical detective tradition: Wilkie Collins, whose The Moonstone is often cited as the first English detective novel; G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories; Anna Katharine Green's early American detective fiction; and the wider body of nineteenth-century mystery and crime writing. Every book on this shelf is a verified public-domain text.

For a reader coming to classical detective fiction for the first time, Doyle is the natural place to start. His stories are short, self-contained, and endlessly re-readable. Start reading.

Book Renzo

Mystery

Mad Mabel

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

The Perfect Divorce

The Perfect Marriage =

It Could Have Been Her

We Were Liars

First Lie Wins

Listen for the Lie

Broken Country

The Family Upstairs

Then She Was Gone

None of This Is True

The God of the Woods

Five Survive

One of Us Is Back

One of Us Is Next

One of Us Is Lying

The Secret of Chimneys

The Circular Staircase

The Oakdale Affair

Where There's a Will

The Count's Millions

A Study in Scarlet

The Wisdom of Father Brown

Mystery and Detective Fiction — Sherlock Holmes, Auguste Dupin, and the Birth of the Genre