Short answers, pulled from the story.
"The Three Apples", a tale from the One Thousand and One Nights narrated by Scheherazade, is the oldest known example of a detective story. In it, the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid orders his vizier Ja'far ibn Yahya to identify the murderer of a young woman found in a locked chest pulled from the Tigris river, or face execution.
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", published in 1841, is considered the first English-language detective fiction story. Its protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin, is described as the first fictional detective. Poe followed it with "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" in 1842 and "The Purloined Letter" in 1844.
The Golden Age of Detective Fiction refers to the interwar period, the 1920s and 1930s. During this era, a number of very popular writers emerged, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. In 1929, Ronald Knox codified the genre's conventions in his Decalogue of ten rules.
Agatha Christie is the most famous Golden Age detective fiction writer and is considered one of the most famous authors of all genres. At her death in 1976, she was described as the best-selling novelist in history. She created long-running series featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, with best-known works including Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and And Then There Were None (1939).
Hardboiled detective fiction is an American style that emerged in the late 1920s and 1930s, associated with writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It focuses on criminal activity in modern urban environments, told in stark language through the perspective of tough private investigators. Hammett's Sam Spade and Chandler's Philip Marlowe are the genre's defining characters.
Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887 and first widely popular after publication in the Strand Magazine in 1891, became the template for detective characters worldwide. In China, the first four Holmes stories were translated and serialized in 1896. Chinese writer Cheng Xiaoqing created his own Holmes-inspired detective, Huo Sang, whose name shares the same initials as Holmes and whose methods mirror those of his model.