| The historical whodunnit is a sub-genre of the historical
novel, in which the central plot involves a crime (almost always a murder) and the setting is historical. The "detective" may
be a real-life historical figure, eg. Socrates, Jane Austen, Mozart, or an
imaginary character.
The first known author to have written anything that might be described as a historical whodunnit is Melville Davisson Post, whose "Uncle Abner" stories were serialised in American newspapers from 1911 onwards. It was not until 1943 that Lillian de la Torre, an
American mystery writer, did something similar with Dr Johnson and
Boswell. In 1950, John Dickson Carr produced a novel called The Bride of Newgate,
set during the Napoleonic Wars, and this may be called the first
full-length historical whodunnit.
Such stories remained an oddity, and the current trend for historical whodunnits only really began in the late 1970s with the
success of Ellis Peters and her Brother Cadfael novels, set in medieval Shrewsbury.
Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980) was a one-off that helped
popularise the concept. Although authors such as Anne Perry wrote in the genre
during the next decade, it wasn't until about 1990 that the genre's popularity saw a fairly quick ascent with works such as
Lindsey Davis's Falco novels, set in the Roman Empire of Vespasian; Elizabeth
Peters's Amelia Peabody novels, in which the main character is not
only a Victorian lady but an early feminist and an archaeologist working
in early 20th century Egypt; and Steven Saylor's "Roma Sub Rosa" novels, set in the Roman
Empire of Julius Caesar.
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