Detective fiction counts amongst the most successfulliterary products that the metropolitan west hasexported to the world periphery. Between the end ofthe nineteenth century and the outbreak of theSecond World War the genre acquired a globalpresence – both in the form of translations ofexisting works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories,and in the form of numerous indigenous adaptations.This kind of literature represented a prime exampleof the mass-produced and mass-circulated printentertainment that was part and parcel of theemergence of mass consumption as a social form.Detective fiction was, thus, both a carrier and anexpression of modernity. While some literarytheorists have pointed to longstanding historicalantecedents, detective fiction would not have madesense in earlier historical epochs. The principlesof scientific enquiry permeate the genre throughout,not just in terms of the ubiquitous magnifyingglasses, finger-prints and assorted scientificapparatuses, but in terms of the subject matteritself – the fact that it is possible to make senseof an increasingly confusing world by uncoveringhidden causal connections through rationalenquiry.