The greatest of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes (Holmes, Sherlock), along with his loyal, somewhat obtuse companion Dr. Watson, made his first appearance in Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Conan Doyle (Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur)'s novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) and continued into the 20th century in such collections of stories as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894) and the longer Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). So great was the appeal of Sherlock Holmes's detecting style that the death of Conan Doyle did little to end Holmes's career; several writers, often expanding upon circumstances mentioned in the original works, have attempted to carry on the Holmesian tradition.

In a sense, the 1930s was the golden age of the detective story, with the detectives named above continuing in new novels. The decade was also marked by the books of Dashiell Hammett (Hammett, Dashiell), who drew upon his own experience as a private detective to produce both stories and novels, notably The Maltese Falcon (1930) featuring Sam Spade. In Hammett's work, the character of the detective became as important as the “whodunit” aspect of ratiocination was earlier. The Thin Man (1934), with Nick and Nora Charles, was more in the conventional vein, with the added fillip of detection by a witty married couple. Successors to Hammett included Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, who also emphasized the characters of their tough but humane detectives Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, respectively. At the end of the 1940s, Mickey Spillane (Spillane, Mickey) preserved the hard-boiled crime fiction approach of Hammett and others, but his emphasis on sex and sadism became a formula that brought him amazing commercial success beginning with I, the Jury (1947).

Notable works on the detective story include Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure, enlarged ed. (1968); and Jacques Barzun and Wendell H. Taylor, Catalogue of Crime (1971).