The Evolution of Detectives in Fiction

Max Allan Collins discusses it on the Huffington Post.

From the piece...

I, the Jury was a game-changer, revitalizing the tired private eye genre, which by the late '40s had been reduced to self-parody by B movies and spoofy radio series. Every now and then, the mystery novel - particularly the private eye variety - seems played out; and then someone like Mickey comes along to kick-start it in some imaginative new way.

Fictional detectives thrived through the twentieth century, but the genre only began sixty years before, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote his handful of stories about amateur sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin. Detectives and police forces were relatively new in Western civilization, an outgrowth of the democracies of Europe and the United States in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Soon detectives and mystery plots began emerging from such popular authors as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and real-life private eye Allan Pinkerton's celebrated cases sparked a wave of dime-novel detectives, perhaps most memorably Nick Carter.

Detectives were entrenched in the popular culture by the turn of the twentieth century, with the famed pulp magazine Black Mask at the forefront. In those pages, a largely forgotten author, Carroll John Daly, created the literary private eye, his Race Williams a western gunfighter moved bodily to the urban jungle, where his blazing .45 and merciless sense of justice excited a young boy in New Jersey named Mickey Spillane.