Gumshoes: A Dictionary of Fictional Detectives

Through the Victorian era and into the twenty‐first century, detective stories remain ever popular – with increasing sales of books, films, videos, and DVDs. Richmond was the first police detective as the hero of a novel. He appeared in Thomas Gapsey's Richmond, or Scenes from the Life of a Bow Street Runner published in 1827. (The Bow Street Runners were Scotland Yard's predecessors). Charles Dickens incorporated the Bow Street Runners into Oliver Twist and created the first fictional English detective with Inspector Bucket of Bleak House, “stolid and apparently unremarkable”, but treating him both realistically and sympathetically in...