Mystery fiction

Mystery fiction is a genre in which the nature of an event, often a murder or other crime, remains mysterious until the end of the story. The genre emphasizes "the puzzle or suspense element and its logical solution": typically a closed circle of suspects, each with motive and opportunity, and a detective who works it out by logical deduction from facts presented to the reader. The same coverage contrasts this with hardboiled crime, which leans on action and gritty realism rather than the puzzle.

The form is young: it developed from the early 19th century, tied to rising literacy and the arrival of institutional police forces, with Hoffmann's Das Fräulein von Scuderi (1819), Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), Collins's The Moonstone (1868) and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories from 1887 as the runway, and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) as the world's best-selling mystery novel. Its shelves include the whodunit, the locked-room mystery, the cozy mystery and the police procedural. For serial writers it is the information-control genre: the reader's knowledge at each installment is the game board. See how to write mystery.