As Wikipedia’s entry notes, detective fiction usually centers around a murder investigation. But not always. Off the top of my head, there are several Sherlock Holmes stories that center around theft or kidnapping or mysterious disapperances. (Of course, it’s been long enough since I read them that I’m not able to remember specific titles.)
I don’t think any of the Encyclopedia Brown stories deal with murder (except for that one where he solves an Old West murder 100 years after it happens). I also don’t know that I’d argue that EB are great detective stories.
Most kids’ mysteries that I can think of don’t deal with murder. One that seems to – but turns out not to – is Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game and that one I’d nominate as great.
So: what great detective and mystery novels involve crimes other than murder? No one is killed to kick off the investigation, no one is murdered in the course of the investigation. Any other crimes are fair game. Novels that seem to be about a murder but turn out not to be – such as the spoiler-boxed one above – are fair game, if no one ends up getting murdered as the investigation proceeds.
Well, I don’t know that much about mystery novels. Asimov’s series of ‘black widower’ mystery stories are usually violence-free – a handful of them involve suspicious deaths and so on, but those are far in the minority. Quite good too, I think.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”, one of the earliest detective stories, and it doesn’t involve any murder, just theft, blackmail, and treason.
At least one of Robert van Gulik’s “Judge dee” short stories involves a case without murder (although the Dee stories do tend to get pretty bloody). Asimov’s “Wendell Urth” stories, IIRC, are pretty bloodless. And in several Sherlock Holmes stories, as Watson himself notes, there was, in fact, no actual crime. “The Man with the Twisted Lip”, for instance.
Many of the cases in John Mortimer’s “Rumpole of the Bailey” series revolve around bloodless events – “Rumpole and the Age for Retirement”, for instance.
Asimov’s “The Robots of Dawn” didn’t have any murder in it either, unless the old “Confuse a robot with a logical paradox so that it shuts down” trick counts as murder.
It’s been a while, but I seem to recall G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday being murderless. Of course, it’s hardly a typical “detective” story.
I once read a monograph on the subject and…Well, actually, it was an essay in Armchair Detective magazine but saying it was a “monograph” made it sound more Sherlockian somehow. Anyway, the author suggested that Van Dine’s rules for mysteries written in the mid 20s almost made it almost mandatory that detectives try to solve murders to be worth writing about.
I can think of a couple of Christi short stories, but no novels that didn’t involve murder.
Did Twain’s Puddin’ Head Wilson involve a murder?
I cannot think of a Raymond Chandler that doesn’t involve murder. Wait a minute, wasn’t there that one where they thought his friend had been killed, but it turned out he faked his own murder and slipped off to Mexico?
Dashiel Hammett - some of his Continental OP stories were not murder relataed. Ross McDonald - I think there was one where they thought it was murder but it turned out to be suicide but by then someone else had been killed. Mickey Spillane - always murder. John D. McDonald always murder, but there was that one like Chandler’s but others ended up being killed along the way.
Biggers had a Charlie Chan novel that was about robbery as I remember.
I can’t remember any Nero Wolfe Novels by Stout not dealing with murder on some level.
The problem with me is that my resource library dealing with mystery fiction is all in storage and I have to depend on my memory and it is not as impressive as Archie Goodwin’s memory.
Macdonald’s Fletch - wasn’t it built around an about to be murder, that never really came about?
What about Stephie Plum, wasn’t there at least one where nobody actually died -a lot of exploding cars but no murder?
“The Problem of Cell 13” by Jacques Futrelle is a classic story without a murder. I seem to remember that “Silver Box” – another story featuring the detective Professor A.S.F.X. Van Dusen mystery – has no murder, either. I haven’t read much else about Van Dusen, but I think many of his mysteries had no bodies.
“The President of the United States, Detective” by H. F. Heard has no murder.
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine had a long running series of detective stories about a thief who would steal nothing of value. I don’t recall the name, but he stole things and AFAIK, didn’t kill anyone.
I doubt the stories about A.J. Raffles had many murders in them.
Off the top of my head, the novella “Bitter End” was about a non-fatal poisoner. Some of the other novellas/short stories may have been bloodless, but I’m not calling any to mind right now. The League of Frightened Men[has only apparent murders at first, but there is a real one by the end, I believe. However, the man who had deliberately convinced everyone he was a"murderer" was innocent of it.
Fletch was hired to help a rich man who wanted to kill himself but didn’t want his family to lose out on his life insurance. When he went to the guy’s office, he found someone else had already done it. (Since the real murderer didn’t know about the money, it was there for Fletch to take. This became the seed money of his fortune later in the series).
I read something similar a while ago, but can’t recall what exactly it was. That’s really what prompted this thread, though – I started to try and figure out what the best mystery with no murder was, and was quickly stumped the way only a casual genre fan can be.
As we can see from this thread, it’s a lot harder to come up with examples if we limit ourselves to novels (as opposed to short stories) for adults.
I vaguely recall reading one of Andrew Greeley’s mystery novels in which there’s only an attempted murder, with the victim lying in a coma through most of the book.
