Just as it is possible to expand the idea of detective fiction back to episodes in the Bible, oriental tales, and folk riddles, so too the short story can be dissolved into any form of brief tale. But, as Walter Allen suggests, the emergence of the nineteenth-century short story is, precisely, a modern phenomenon. By the same token, the appearance of a new and modern kind of protagonist from the mid-nineteenth century, who has come to be called 'the detective', marks a distinction from earlier mysteries. In both cases, Edgar Allan Poe plays a crucial innovative role.

While the form initiated by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) flourished in America, the short story failed to make as great an impression in Britain until the end of the century, held back by the success of the three-decker or serialised novel. However, when it did take off, this was in no small part due to the success of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories in George Newnes’s Strand Magazine (founded in 1891).