I may be out of luck here but I don’t know where else to ask this question so here goes:
The detective story has precedents going back to the Bible but it is generally accepted to have begun coincident with the development of actual detectives in France in the 1850’s. American writer Poe was deeply interested in then contemporary France and wrote a series of stories that we commonly accept as the first detective stories. It was picked up by the French realists in the person of Gaboriau, and the British modernists Dickens and Collins until it finally exploded into wide popularity and formal recognition as a genre in its own right from Doyle.
My question is: It seems like for a very long time the actual creation of detective stories was limited to writers in the US, UK, or France: does anyone know who the first detective story writers were in other nations like the Netherlands, Japan, Italy, or Germany? Can anyone point me towards early examples of the genre outside the big three?
Thanks in advance.
by wmcguire18