'Murder Will Out' - The Detective in Fiction from Poe to the Present

''No-one has approached the vast, continuing corpus of detective fiction in quite this way before.'' Financial Times

What is it that has always made the detective such a popular figure in fiction? Why are we always so seduced by the search to discover ''whodunit''? And how far back does this fascination go?

Following the trail of the detective - from Poe''s Chevalier Dupin to the time of this book''s first publication in 1989 - T J Binyon''s brilliant history explores one of fiction''s most enduring characters, in all its many guises. Murder Will Out is an essential guide for anyone who has ever been gripped by a good crime novel and wants to investigate further.