Ever since Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841, starting a new trend in fiction, countless readers have enjoyed stories of unsolved crime. From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to contemporary authors such as Cormac McCarthy and Walter Mosley, detective, or crime fiction, has evolved in technique and style, but can it truly be labeled a genre?

Northrop Frye explained the difficulty of defining genres. He claimed that "the basis of generic distinctions in…