Gentleman detective

The gentleman detective is a type of fictional character that has long been a staple of crime fiction, particularly in detective novels and short stories set in the United Kingdom in the Golden Age. While not necessarily aristocracy, the heroes of these adventures are often members of the British gentry or gentlemen by conduct. They are sometimes contrasted with professional police force detectives from the working classes.

Gentleman detectives include amateurs, private detectives and professional policemen. They are always well educated, frequently have unusual or eccentric hobbies, and are commonly found in their natural environment, an English country house. This archetype of British detective contrasts with the more "hardboiled" counterpart in American crime fiction.

Gentlemen detectives appeared early in modern detective fiction, which began in the late 19th century.

C. Auguste Dupin, created by Edgar Allan Poe, is widely considered to be the first fictional detective in English literature. He appeared in three short stories written in the 1840s: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842) and "The Purloined Letter" (1844).

Poe created Dupin before the word detective had been coined, but began many common elements of detective fiction: Dupin shares some features with the later gentleman detective. He was "…the first fictional detective of importance and the model for virtually every cerebral crime solver who followed." More specifically, Dorothy L. Sayers noted that "Sherlock Holmes modelled himself to a large extent upon (Poe's) Dupin, substituting cocaine for candlelight, with accompaniments of shag and fiddle-playing."

Dupin is French, not English, but is probably a gentleman. He comes from a once wealthy family but has been reduced "by a variety of untoward events" to more humble circumstances. He is entirely amateur and contents himself only with the basic necessities of life. He lives in Paris with his close friend, the anonymous narrator of the stories. Like the much later Lord Peter Wimsey (see below), Dupin is a bibliophile, and met his narrator friend while both were searching for "the same rare and very remarkable volume" in an obscure library. For hobbies, Dupin is "fond" of enigmas, conundrums, and hieroglyphics. Dupin also bears the French title Chevalier, meaning that he is a knight in the Légion d'honneur.

The classic British gentleman detective appears soon after Poe's Dupin. A gentleman amateur is the ultimate hero of The Moonstone (1868), a famous epistolary novel widely considered the first true detective novel in English. Its author, Wilkie Collins was a lawyer, and a close friend of Charles Dickens. Collins also used gifted amateurs in his earlier mystery novel, The Woman in White (1859).

In The Moonstone, Rachel Verinder is the only child of a rich, aristocratic widow. On her eighteenth birthday, she is bequeathed an enormous diamond; that night, this 'moonstone' is stolen from the country house of her mother, Lady Verinder. After local police are baffled, a Bow Street Runner called Sergeant Cuff is called in. Sergeant Cuff is honourable and skilful, but he is not a gentleman, and is unable to break Rachel's reticence about what is clearly an inside job.