11 Facts About Crime Fiction To Impress Your Friends

Next time you're at a dinner party or need some quickie facts to show how cool crime fiction really is (as if you really needed an excuse), maybe these will come in handy:

 

1. Agatha Christie (1890–1976) is the world’s best-selling fiction writer, according to the Guinness Book of Records. Her seventy some-odd crime novels and short story collections have sold an estimated 2 billion copies (although some estimates peg it at up to 4 billion).
   
   
2. Agatha Christie is also the most-translated individual author – having been translated into at least 103 languages. (Source: Index Translationum)
   
   
3. The most prolific mystery author was John Creasey, who wrote over 600 books under 28 different pseudonyms. Coming in a close second is Georges Simenon, with 500+ books. (Brazilian author Ryoki Inoue created Portuguese-language pulp fiction to the tune of nearly 1,100 books, but many of those were romances.) (Source: Guinness book of World Records)
   
   
4. The first literary detective is widely considered to be C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared in "The Murders In the Rue Morgue" in 1841, written by Edgar Allan Poe.
   
   
5. The earliest known crime novel is The Rector of Veilbye by the Danish author Steen Steensen Blicher, published in 1829. Although one could make the argument that the earliest known example of a crime story was "The Three Apples," one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade from Arabian Nights.
   
   
6. The earliest locked-room mystery may well be from the 5th century BC, when Herodotus told the tale of the robber whose headless body was found in a sealed stone chamber with only one guarded exit. But the first of the true modern example of that genre is generally said to be Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."
   
   
7. The first detective film is often cited as Sherlock Holmes Baffled, a very short Mutoscope reel created between 1900 and 1903 by Arthur Marvin.
   
   
8. The highest circulating crime fiction subgenre titles in 2013 in the U.S. were police procedurals at 29%, according to the Library Journal Mystery Survey. Cozies were a close second place at 24%, with Amateur Detectives third at 19%.  
   
   
9. In that same Library Journal survey, crime fiction was the most-frequently borrowed genre, at a whopping 78% (mysteries, 55%, thrillers, 23%).
   
   
10. The very first Edgar Awards Grand Master honor was given in 1955 to Agatha Christie - but most people probably don't know Alfred Hitchcock was given that title in 1978 (the only non-mystery-author to be so honored).
    
    
11. Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake hold the record for total Edgar Award honors, with 11 nominations and 5 wins (including the Grand Master Award) for Block and 11 nominations and 4 wins for Westlake. Westlake was also one of only three writers (along with Joe Gores and William L. DeAndrea) to win Edgars in three different categories (Best Novel, Best Short Story, Best Motion Picture Screenplay). (Source: Edgar Awards database)