The Big Sleep

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and... in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century. Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the works of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history. The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements , a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western market of fiction. The separation of a field of histories from a field of literary fiction fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.
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Detective fiction is a sub-genre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator , either professional or amateur, investigates a... crime, often murder. Some scholars have suggested that some ancient and religious texts bear similarities to what would later be called detective fiction. In the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders , the story told by two witnesses breaks down when Daniel cross-examines them. The author Julian Symons has commented on writers who see this as a detective story, arguing that "those who search for fragments of detection in the Bible and Herodotus are looking only for puzzles" and that these puzzles are not detective stories. In the play Oedipus Rex by Ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, the title character discovers the truth about his origins after questioning various witnesses.
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Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalises crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from... mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred. It has several sub-genres, including detective fiction , legal thriller, courtroom drama and hard-boiled fiction. While the archetype for a murder mystery dates back to "The Three Apples" in the One Thousand and One Nights, crime fiction began to be considered as a serious genre only around 1900. The earliest known crime novel is "The Rector of Veilbye" by the Danish author Steen Steensen Blicher, published in 1829. Better known are the earlier dark works of Edgar Allan Poe , " The Mystery of Marie Roget " , and "The Purloined Letter" . Wilkie Collins' epistolary novel The Woman in White was published in 1860, while The Moonstone is often thought to be his masterpiece. French author Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq laid the groundwork for the methodical, scientifically minded detective.
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