Detective, Mystery, and Suspense Fiction

A Guide to the Collections
of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library

The detective story originated in the mid-nineteenth century. Although its basic form has remained intact, the genre has branched into numerous subgenres: espionage, gothic, psychological suspense, police procedural, courtroom, whodunit, the conspicuously British drawing room mystery, and even to a certain degree the horror story. Each form has its practitioners, each its fans. Sometimes elements of these various genres are combined, themes are often intermingled, and mystery aficionados--who usually tend to stick to what they like--can experience difficulty in locating stories or novels in a particular favorite genre. Similarly, mystery fans tend to gravitate towards work which emphasizes a certain subject or milieu. Keeping track of authors can present another difficulty. While some authors have risen to prominence and written books of enduring value, others have enjoyed a small period of success and faded into obscurity, while others remain unknown outside their small circle of devoted admirers. Many stories of mystery and detection, having served their ephemeral purposes, quickly fade from memory. A smaller quantity so accurately capture the prevailing social and moral climate and explore so precisely the dark mysteries of the human heart that they become permanently absorbed into our consciousness.

Sorting through this tremendous body of material can be both the pleasure and the pain of the mystery reader. Instinct can only take us so far. For example, enjoying one novel by a favorite author will obviously lead to another by the same author, but how can that other work be tracked down; which anthologies contain particular short stories, and where can the uncollected work be found; and, once this author's fictional output has been exhausted, where can another author be found who employs a similar theme or approach? This is where we can profitably turn to the following resources for help.

The mystery or detective novel is well represented in the fiction collections of the Research Libraries. The General Research Division administers the stack collections which encompass the nineteenth-century stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins to the twentieth-century works of Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie and P. D. James. The collections are particularly strong on novels with a New York City setting.

This guide will not attempt to cover the many sub-genres such as Sherlockiana, or the foreign-language contributions to the genre. It will provide general reference sources containing much detailed information on these topics.

For those interested in researching the origins and history of the modern detective story, the Library's Special Collections house many rare items. The Arents Collection collects "shilling shockers" and "penny dreadfuls." The Berg Collection contains manuscripts of notable authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Rare Book Room holds an extensive Dime Novel collection. A checklist of this collection is available in The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, vol. 26, pp. 555-628. Qualified researchers may gain access to all these collections through the Office of Special Collections, Room 316.

If you need further assistance, visit our reference desk, or e-mail us at grdref@nypl.org