Detective (novel)

Detective is a novel by Arthur Hailey. It was written in 1997 and it was the author's last book. Hailey depicts the work of the homicide department and its background and investigation methods.

Plot

Detective is the story of Miami Police detective Malcolm Ainslie, who had previously trained to be a Catholic priest. A serial killer breaks free in Miami. He is a religious freak and he starts killing people feeling that he is the avenger of God. He leaves certain things at the murder scenes that are symbols from the Book of Revelation.

Miami Police Detective Sergeant Malcolm Ainslie and his team start to investigate the murders. They eventually find the killer and arrest him. The murderer is nicknamed The Animal because he kills in such a barbaric manner. Now, when this man is about to be executed for the serial killings he did, he calls for Malcolm. 30 minutes before his execution he confesses to Malcolm that he did all the serial killings he is accused of except one, which was not done by him.

Detective fiction

Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—either professional or amateur—investigates a crime, often murder.

Beginnings of detective fiction

In ancient literature

Some scholars have suggested that certain ancient and religious texts bear similarities to what would later be called detective fiction. In the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders (the Protestant Bible locates this story within the apocrypha), the account told by two witnesses breaks down when Daniel cross-examines them. The author Julian Symons has commented on writers who see this as a detective story, arguing that "those who search for fragments of detection in the Bible and Herodotus are looking only for puzzles" and that these puzzles are not detective stories. In the play Oedipus Rex by Ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, the title character discovers the truth about his origins after questioning various witnesses. Although "Oedipus's enquiry is based on supernatural, pre-rational methods that are evident in most narratives of crime until the development of Enlightenment thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries", this narrative has "all of the central characteristics and formal elements of the detective story, including a mystery surrounding a murder, a closed circle of suspects, and the gradual uncovering of a hidden past."