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WHEN SOPHOCLES'S Oedipus determined to find the murderer of the former Theban king, Laius, in the fifth century BCE, the genre of detective fiction was bom. The tamer of the Sphinx, who "all men call the Great," was above all a master detective, and in this case he solved his mystery and got his man. But the source of the plague on his city was not, as Oedipus had anticipated, a band of wayfarers or a solitary robber. The first detective in literary history learned at the end of his pursuit that he himself was the criminal.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the genre Sophocles launched had changed in many ways, but what was most tragic in the tale of Oedipus endured. When the detective reappeared in literature in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, he did so, according to the literary historian Ian Ousby, "not as a hero, but as, at worst, a villain and, at best, a suspect and ambiguous character." From Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild to the Memoirs of EugèneFrançois Vidocq (founder of the French detective force) to Vautrin in Honoré de Balzac's The Human Comedy, detectives of this period were often also criminals or former criminals, who cut dark and marginal figures in increasingly professional police forces. In 1841, in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Edgar Allan Poe inaugurated the modem era of detective fiction and with it a new kind of detective. In this genre, detectives were for the most part wellborn and intellectual, and had no criminal past. But even though they were no longer criminals, these detectives did retain an almost unseen understanding with those who transgressed the law-an inheritance from Sophocles's Theban king.
The detectives in the early modem period of detective fiction (which lasted roughly from 1841 to the First World War) were thus often not, as they may have seemed to be to contemporary readers and later critics alike, public-spirited guardians of the social and political order. Rather, in a genre marked by reversals, perhaps the most fantastic was that the detective shared an elemental identity with the criminal. What drew them together was a way of thinking, in particular an idea of crime and detection as nothing more than species of...