committed mean universal to us, I'm not sure it would have the same pull back then because of the things Catalog mentioned re: the Enlightenment.
I'm not disagreeing though. Cos surely all through history there were crimes committed and people wanting to know who it was that had committed them. But maybe that sort of thing was part of a story rather than the main focus.
When did genre fiction in general start to exist?
If Princess of Cleves is often seen as the start of the novel, then when did you start getting detective, horror, chick-lit and so on? Would be interesting to see a chart of that development. Though it would obviously involve a lot of fudging and arguing about what counted as which genre etc
It's got me wondering though. What was the first murder mystery? The "first murder" is Cain, right? There's no mystery there though as the story's just him killing Abel. There's no need to work out who it was. Also, there are stories of murder prior to Christianity, e.g. the Osiris myth.
There's no mystery for the reader, but then Columbo is the same isn't it? I mean there is a whole type of detective fiction where the viewer/reader knows what happened but we still watch the detective solve it.
So, when God asks Cain where Abel is and Abel famously replies "Am I my brother's keeper?" arguably God is at least momentarily mystified - surprisingly so considering he is supposed to omnipresent and all-knowing etc - but when he realises that murder has been committed, credit where credit's due, God does get it wrapped up fairly quickly. Though seeing as there are only three living humans in existence at this point even Lestrade would have probably been able to solve this without calling in Holmes.