Historical Detective Fiction: An Annotated Bibliographic Dataset of 301 Novels and Series (first publications 1594–2023)

Abstract

About This is a single-author, source-verified bibliographic dataset of 301 works of historical detective fiction – single novels and whole series, first published between 1594 and 2023, in 36 original languages, in 46 countries. Each of the 301 entries is a bibliographic record carrying an annotation, describing why the work counts as historical, why it counts as detective, and why it is a significant enough specimen to belong in a cross-national sample. Since I am dealing with mass literature, I had to implement some axiological judgement to keep the work on the dataset feasible. Entries are sorted chronologically by the earliest date of the setting (time of action), from c. 2000 BC (Egypt, 11th Dynasty) to 1956. Sorted this way, the dataset can be considered a rough map of which historical periods the genre has colonised. The table is designed to be read on its own, without a codebook. Every cell is a plain statement in English with its sources attached; a criterion that was not used is written out as “not used as a criterion”. What is "historical"? A work enters the dataset if at least fifty years separate the date of first publication from the earliest date of the action. Different awarding and reviewing institutions set different thresholds here. The Historical Writers' Association asks for thirty-five years; The Historical Novel Society sets fifty (Richard Lee); its review journal Historical Novels Review applies the same figure: "a 'historical novel' is a novel which is set fifty or more years in the past, and one in which the author is writing from research rather than personal experience" (Sarah Johnson). The Crime Writers' Association's Historical Dagger also uses fifty years "prior to the year in which the award will be made". The Walter Scott Prize requires sixty: "the majority of the book, ie more than 50%, must be set at least 60 years before its publication date". I sided with the 50-year rule as a compromise, measuring the distance from first publication. Where a work runs on more than one time layer, the distance is measured to the earliest layer. A novel published in 2015 that moves between 1942, 1967 and 2015 is measured against 1942. The series is taken as a whole, if at least the first book complies with the 50-year rule. The setting column still covers the whole cycle. Other significant considerations: All five significance criteria scale to the whole series in the same way. An adaptation of a single novel, a genre award given to the first book, a scholarly article devoted to the fifth, translations into three languages spread over different volumes, a reissue of one title only – all that counts. The series is treated as one bibliographic unit, so evidence attaching to any part of it counts for all of it. A series is truncated where its later books leave the genre. For example, Yulian Semyonov's cycle about Vsevolod Vladimirov/Isaev (Stierlitz) is represented here only by Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat: I argue that the subsequent novels are spy fiction with a much smaller investigation component. What is "detective"? For the editor of this dataset the literary work is detective fiction/crime fiction/a mystery if it carries a settled genre label from the national literary tradition, such as giallo (or even giallo storico), polar (or more precisely polar historique), 公案小説, Krimi, 역사추리소설. For example, A. Camilleri's historical Vigàta novels on a narrow reading of detection would be marginal, but they are marketed and studied in Italy as gialli. The same holds for genre awards, where I just follow the genre attributions of the juries. For the hybrid cases, where there is no tradition and no award committee decision, I applied a structural test which I will show on the example of Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn, a gothic novel with a mystery/detection core in doubt. In order to belong to the crime/detection/mystery genre, a novel must contain: A crime. An act the text treats as a violation and from which it proceeds towards the restoration of justice. In “Jamaica Inn” it’s the organization of a smuggling and wrecker gang (coastal piracy). An investigation – the chain of evidence, testimonies, false leads, psychological reconstructions in the plot. In du Maurier’s novel the main character rather quickly realizes that the true leader of the gang is not her uncle. She peeps, eavesdrops, examines suspicious places, questions various people, analyses a drawing, and tries to pass the information on to the authorities. An investigator – a figure who conducts that inquiry. In “Jamaica Inn” it’s Mary Yellan. An “investigator” in our conception needn’t necessarily be a professional, a single person or even contemporary with the crime. This structural test draws on the most significant theoretical works on the genre. Tzvetan Todorov argued that the whodunit is always "not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation” (The Typology of Detective Fiction, in The Poetics of Prose, 1977). John G. Cawelti's formula for the classical detective story opens with exactly the same elements in the same order: "(a) introduction of the detective; (b) crime and clues; (c) investigation", before the solution, its explanation and the dénouement (Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 1976). My test keeps the three structural positions and drops everything Cawelti's later phases prescribe about how the case must end, because a cross-national sample has to admit traditions that do not resolve the way the Anglo-American puzzle novel resolves. When I had to choose myself, I didn’t include in the dataset the historical novels where the crime is present but not investigated in front of the reader’s eyes (the novels in the form of the criminal’s and witnesses’ memoirs, for example). This is how Thomas Korovinis's Ο γύρος του θανάτου [=The Round of Death] was left out, since it is not the story of an investigation but a more complex narration of a city history and of a miscarriage of justice. Andrea Maria Schenkel's The Murder Farm, which likewise has no investigator, is in the dataset, because the German literary field consistently treats it as a Krimi. One of the most difficult tasks was to separate the historical mystery from the spy fiction, which also describes actions considered a crime by at least one state. Here I had to apply the rule that the offence which opens the investigation must be an ordinary criminal one, not an offence against state security (at least at the beginning). This is why “Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, opening with the theft from a state depository, is included, though the investigator is a special service (Cheka) officer and the case is clearly related to the external politics and diplomacy. If a sleuth operates in a period when intelligence services in the modern sense did not yet exist and occasionally becomes involved in matters of state security, I needed to consider how much of the series as a whole is detective fiction and how much is spy fiction. Thus, Matthew Shardlake, Nicolas Le Floch and Erast Fandorin primarily investigate ordinary crimes, although – as seems inevitable over the course of such long series – they often become involved in court or military affairs. The detective fiction that is also historical fiction is treated here as one genre, following the dedicated scholarship on it, in particular Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr.'s collection The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (2000), and the place given to historical crime writing in Jerome de Groot's survey The Historical Novel (2009). The process of finding the entries The searching was done by large language models under the author's instructions (see Dataset making and verification). Candidates were proposed by the models and admitted or rejected by the author. 1. By region, then by country by the following clusters: the Anglophone countries; the post-Soviet states (Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia); geographic Europe apart from the post-Soviet states; the Middle East and Turkey; India and South-East Asia; Africa; Eastern Europe and the Balkans; East Asia; Latin America; the remainder of Europe, Greece included; and separately early settings – action before AD 1000 and/or outside Greece and Rome (Heian and Nara Japan, Tang China, ancient Egypt, Byzantium, the Abbasid caliphate, pre-Columbian America). The clusters were then swept again, and after that there was a second round country by country, alphabetically, in small batches, with the searching done in the languages of the country. At this stage a work belonged to a region through its author, not its setting (for example, Van Gulik's Judge Dee novels are searched and counted as Dutch, not Chinese). 2. By award. Shortlists and longlists of the CWA Historical Dagger (from 1999), the Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery Award / Macavity (from 2006), the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel (from 2001), the Bruce Alexander Memorial Historical Mystery Award (from 2004), the Herodotus Award (1999–2002), and also French, Spanish, Italian and other national genre prizes. A list was worked until its yield of new names fell below ten per cent. 3. By indexes and backwards from the adaptations. Stop You're Killing Me!'s Historical Period Index and Allen J. Hubin's Crime Fiction IV: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1749–2000, the latter also for its film and television indexes. Then the reverse direction, from adaptation back to book. Wikidata SPARQL queries (adaptation → book → author), IMDb advanced search, national film databases, and BBC Genome for radio and television dramatisations, including early anthology productions of the 1950s. 4. By language. Japanese torimonochō through ja.wikipedia, torimono.jp and drama databases; German