A bit all over the place. If you include bond, which is not detective fiction but exclude rebus which is ... I mean sure, it's a nice read, but crime fiction is alive and well.

Robert Harris comes to mind too.

If the point is that whodunit has moved on, so has almost every other genre.

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sharkjacobs 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Casino Royale isn't cited as an example of golden age English detective fiction, the article suggests that books like Casino Royale, "with twists at every turn" and "overt depictions of sex and violence" were part of a new style of popular fiction which displaced the classical English detective story

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101008 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Crime fiction is not just alive and well, it's at the top of bestseller. Robert Galbraith's new book (The Hallmarked Man) was #1 in the bset seller list, with almost 50k copies sold (one of the most sold books of the year). And it's #8 in the Cormoran Strike series.

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KnuthIsGod 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

"The Hallmarked Man is a crime fiction novel written by the British author J. K. Rowling, and published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Released on 2 September 2025, it is the eighth book in the Cormoran Strike series of detective fiction novels, following The Running Grave."

	▲	bcraven 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		We're getting ai summaries on HN now?

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mft_ 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Hard to interpret that example, since the popularity of “Robert Galbraith” is strongly driven by who the author really is.

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wiether 3 days ago | parent [-]

If it was trash, I doubt that it would still be a best-seller on its book #8 on the series, twelve years in.

Furthermore, given what's surrounding its author, there's a non-negligible part of the readers community that won't read it, just because of its author. And it can be seen as _risky_ to read anything she publishes. During a party, someone decided to stop talking to me once I told I was currently reading a book in the series (we were discussing our current reading, so I wasn't trying to do anything smart here). On the other hand, I doubt there's people still buying her books just to _own the libs_.

Sure, it helped launching the series, but if there's still thousands people reading it after more than a decade, maybe it's because those people like it. Maybe.

	▲	mft_ 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We can disagree. 1) In the grand scheme of world literature, JKR’s books are comparative trash. It’s also well-established that the first book was not successful until the real identity of the author was shared. 2) Harry Potter (and all of the related activity) is still hugely popular, despite JKR’s unpleasant views and behaviour related to trans people. Most people in the world aren’t locked into the online zeitgeist.

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benrutter 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think there's a good argument that a "fall" happened. Only a decade after the "golden age" of detective novels, you hace a situation where a lot of once best-selling author's are no longer being published.

But like you point out, there's been a zillion other "rises" too. Maybe a more acurate but much longer article would be "the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise [...] of the British detective novel"

	▲	ggm 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly this.