The Case of the First Mystery Novelist

by Paul Collins

Published: January 7, 2011, New York Times

Reader, never mind whether the butler did it. Here’s a real mystery for you: Who wrote the first detective novel?

For years, the usual suspect was Wilkie Collins, who made the great leap from Poe’s short stories to the Victorian triple-decker novel with “The Moonstone,” published in 1868. Across the Channel, there was Émile Gaboriau and his Monsieur Lecoq, who made his first appearance a few years earlier in “L’Affaire Lerouge,” though Arthur Conan Doyle later had Sherlock Holmes declare Lecoq “a miserable bungler.”

In 1975, however, the novelist and critic Julian Symons revealed in The Times of London a veritable hidden panel in the library of detective literature: a third novel that predates them both. It was “The Notting Hill Mystery,” an anonymous eight-part serial that ran in Once a Week magazine starting on Nov. 29, 1862. But the book itself presented something of a mystery.

“It is unnecessary for us to state by what means the following papers came into our hands. . . . ,” the editors of Once a Week declared. And that was just the problem. Symons pointed out that nobody knew who the author — identified by the pseudonym Charles Felix when the novel was released in book form in 1865 — really was.

But reader, I know whodunit.

First, the murders. “The Notting Hill Mystery” begins in London, where the wife of Baron R** dies after sleepwalking into his home laboratory and drinking a bottle of acid. It looks like a tragic accident, until a private investigator, Ralph Henderson, notices that the baron took out five life insurance policies on Madame R**, worth a staggering £25,000. Hired by an insurance company, Henderson descends into a maze of intrigue that is perfectly and deliriously Victorian: there’s a diabolical mesmerist, kidnapping by gypsies, mysterious carnival girls, slow-poisoners and a rich uncle’s will. Oh, and murder . . . or rather, three murders.


“The Notting Hill Mystery,” published with illustrations by George Du Maurier (the grandfather of Daphne), was extraordinarily innovative. It is presented as Henderson’s own findings — diary entries, family letters, depositions of servant girls, even a chemical analyst’s report. Its crime-scene map and reproduced “evidence” were ideas that wouldn’t gain currency again until the 1920s. The book is both utterly of its time and utterly ahead of it. Symons, writing in 1975, admitted it “quite bowled me over.”

The full piece and name of author at the New York Times.