Page "Detective fiction" Paragraph 1

Some scholars have suggested that some ancient and religious texts bear similarities to what would later be called detective fiction.

In the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders ( Daniel 13 ; in the Protestant Bible this story is found in the apocrypha ), the story told by two witnesses breaks down when Daniel cross-examines them.

The author Julian Symons has commented on writers who see this as a detective story, arguing that " those who search for fragments of detection in the Bible and Herodotus are looking only for puzzles " and that these puzzles are not detective stories.

In the play Oedipus Rex by Ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, the title character discovers the truth about his origins after questioning various witnesses.

Although " Oedipus's enquiry is based on supernatural, pre-rational methods that are evident in most narratives of crime until the development of Enlightenment thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries " it has " all of the central characteristics and formal elements of the detective story, including a mystery sur-rounding a murder, a closed circle of suspects, and the gradual uncovering of a hidden past.