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Crime fiction is a typically 19th , 20th and 21st century genre, dominated by British and American writers. This article explores its historical development as a genre.

Crime Fiction came to be recognised as a distinct literary genre, with specialist writers and a devoted readership, in the 19th century. Earlier novels and stories were typically devoid of systematic attempts at detection: There was a detective, whether amateur or professional, trying to figure out how and by whom a particular crime was committed; there were no police trying to solve a case; neither was there any discussion of motives, alibis, the modus operandi, or any of the other elements which make up the modern crime writing.

An early example of an Arabic language crime story is "The Three Apples", one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). In this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy, locked chest along the Tigris river and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al Rashid, who then has the chest broken open only to find inside it the dead body of a young woman who was cut into pieces. Harun orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and find the murderer within three days, or be executed if he fails his assignment. The story has been described as a "whodunit" murder mystery Unlike the modern crime fiction genre, no investigation is conducted, and the case is instead solved by two men confessing to the crime. The focus of the story shifts to the caliph's demand to find a slave blamed for having an affair with the woman, instigating her husband's crime of passion, but again no investigation is conducted. Ja'far learns the true story, and exonerates the slave, by chance.

Forerunners of today's crime fiction include the ghost story, the horror story, and the revenge story. Early examples of crime stories include Thomas Skinner Sturr's anonymous Richmond, or stories in the life of a Bow Street officer (1827), Steen Steensen Blicher's The Rector of Veilbye (1829), Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1839), and Maurits Christopher Hansen's "Mordet paa Maskinbygger Roolfsen" The Murder of Engineer Roolfsen (1839). An example of an early crime/revenge story is American poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe's (1809–1849) tale "The Cask of Amontillado", published in 1846. Poe created the first fictional detective (a word unknown at the time) in the character of C. Auguste Dupin, as the central character of some of his short stories (which he called "tales of ratiocination"). Here, the reader is presented with a puzzle and encouraged to solve it before finishing the story and being told the solution. These stories are so called because they involve a crime—normally a murder—which takes place in a "locked room". In the simplest case, this is literally a hermetically sealed chamber, which to all appearances, no one could have entered or left at the time of the crime. More generally, it is any crime situation where—again, to all appearances—someone must have entered or left the scene of the crime, yet it was not possible for anyone to have done so. (For example, one such Agatha Christie mystery (And Then There Were None) takes place on a small island during a storm; another is on a train stalled in the mountains and surrounded by new fallen, unmarked snow.) One of the most famous locked room mysteries was The Hollow Man. The resolution of such a story might involve showing how the room was not really "locked", or that it was not necessary for anyone else to have come or gone; that the murderer is still hiding in the room, or that the person to "discover" the murder when the room was unlocked in fact committed it just then.

In 1887, Scotsman Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) gave fresh impetus to the emerging form of the detective story by creating Sherlock Holmes, resident at 221B Baker Street, London—probably the most famous of fictional detectives and the first one to have clients, to be hired to solve a case. Holmes's art of detection consists in logical deduction based on minute details that escape everyone else's notice, and the careful and systematic elimination of all clues that in the course of his investigation turn out to lead nowhere. Conan Doyle also introduced Dr. John H. Watson, a physician who acts as Holmes's assistant and who also shares Holmes's flat in Baker Street.