It deepends in what sense and if it needs to be a novel, rather than a short story, as there were many short crime/detective stories that predated it, but there's an 18th C crime novel of sorts Caleb Williams, a Danish 19th C novella Præsten i Vejlbye and Emile Gaborieau published Monsieur Lecoq in the same year as The Moonstone.
The Moonstone set the pattern for so much of the Golden Age stuff, though, and I'd say nobody would dispute that, but the law of human nature is that there's always someone who would dispute everything!
(I had to Google the above because I couldn't remember where I'd been reading it, because I read a lot of things both about Victorians and classic crime and I had no idea any more. The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders, possibly. Which is very interesting anyway - about the Victorians and their obsession with crime and murder & the literature that came out of it.)
I noticed that and approved. It made me much fonder of whole swathes of the main cast than usually happens with me.
:-D
(I'm never forgiving that guy who wrote a horror novel where Wilkie Collins was a serial killer. I mean, I shouldn't have read it, because obviously a horror novel on that subject was bound not to end well, as that's the duty of horror, but still.)
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It deepends in what sense and if it needs to be a novel, rather than a short story, as there were many short crime/detective stories that predated it, but there's an 18th C crime novel of sorts Caleb Williams, a Danish 19th C novella Præsten i Vejlbye and Emile Gaborieau published Monsieur Lecoq in the same year as The Moonstone.
The Moonstone set the pattern for so much of the Golden Age stuff, though, and I'd say nobody would dispute that, but the law of human nature is that there's always someone who would dispute everything!
(I had to Google the above because I couldn't remember where I'd been reading it, because I read a lot of things both about Victorians and classic crime and I had no idea any more. The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders, possibly. Which is very interesting anyway - about the Victorians and their obsession with crime and murder & the literature that came out of it.)
I noticed that and approved. It made me much fonder of whole swathes of the main cast than usually happens with me.
:-D
(I'm never forgiving that guy who wrote a horror novel where Wilkie Collins was a serial killer. I mean, I shouldn't have read it, because obviously a horror novel on that subject was bound not to end well, as that's the duty of horror, but still.)