If your kids are fans of mysteries, but not of history, well, even mysteries have histories.
The first fictional detective, Auguste C. Dupin, appeared in some short stories by American writer Edgar Allan Poe (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”,1841, “The Mystery of Marie Roget”, 1842) and “The Purloined Letter”, 1845), and The Moonstone (1868) by English writer Wilkie Collins is considered by many to be the first detective novel. Though somewhat dry and ponderous by today’s standards, these tales answered an increasingly literate public’s demand for more entertaining literature, and a genre was born. In 1878, women writers like Anna Katherine Green (The Leavenworth Case) started to get in on the act too, and in 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought the world’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, into being.
