The Detective Conventions

            The conventions of the detective story and the modern detective:.
            
             The detective story has a pattern that has been used time and time again by detective story writers since the creation of C. Auguste Dupin. If you have seen one detective story, chances are that almost every other one follows the same conventions. How can all detective stories be the same? The conventions of the detective story are reported to be more than 150 years old. It began with the famous American writer Edgar Allan Poe and his detective character C. Auguste Dupin, who uses his skills of observation, intuition, and deduction to solve crimes. The modern detective was then created 50 years later by Arthur Conan Doyle through his character Sherlock Holmes. Poe and Doyle are credited with establishing the conventions of the detective story. The conventions of most detective series, including the popular TV series Matlock, are ultimately derived from the pattern established by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. They all follow a similar, minimal story: introduction, crime or mystery, investigation, solution to the mystery, and finally the arrest of the criminals. Also the detective character has its own set of conventions, the detective is usually male, he is rational and intellectual and has a friend as the narrator of the story.
             One of the main conventions from the original detective story is causality, which provides for the reader a sense that later events occurred as a result of earlier ones. In Doyle's The Red-Headed League the reader learns the reason why the red headed man sat in an office copying out the encyclopedia. Matlock follows this pattern of revealing to the audience why specific events occur as they did, thereby meeting the audience's expectation of how the story should unfold. In the Matlock story The Reporter, the viewer learns that the earlier event of the two men entering the house with an unconscious man and then later leaving with a conscious one is why the dental records from the corpse and Glenn Palmer's dental records don't match up.