First Ever Detective Novel Back in Print

The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix, dating back to 1862, preceded The Moonstone by some years.

From a story in the Guardian...

"Is that chain one of purely accidental coincidence, or does it point with terrible certainty to a series of crimes, in their nature and execution too horrible to contemplate?" asks the author Felix, a pseudonym for the journalist, traveller and lawyer Charles Warren Adams. The story's reception at the time was positive: the Guardian called it "very ingeniously put together", the Evening Herald said that "the book in its own line stands alone", while the London Review appears to be getting to grips with what a detective story actually is, describing The Notting Hill Mystery as "a carefully prepared chaos, in which the reader, as in the game called solitaire, is compelled to pick out his own way to the elucidation of the proposed puzzle".

The author Julian Symons identified The Notting Hill Mystery as the first detective novel in 1972, calling its primacy "unquestionable" and its plot "strikingly modern". The British Library first made the novel available via print-on-demand last March, as part of a collection of hundreds of 19th century novels.