I'm doing some light reading on the history of the mystery novel/detective novel, and because most of what I've been touching refers to Sherlock Holmes as a base, I now am really curious to know if there's any classical equivalent to a modern mystery novel. Or, if that's not specific enough, a detective novel. Maybe the answer's obvious and I'm just not thinking properly, but I really want to know if anything like Sherlock Holmes or the Maltese Falcon existed prior to the Renaissance.
You might enjoy reading the deuterocanonical chapters of the Book of Daniel.
The "deuterocanon" is the "secondary canon" - books that (oversimplification follows) for one reason or another weren't part of the Hebrew Bible St. Jerome was using to translate the Vulgate, but were still regarded as scripture, with texts preserved in Greek. They're usually labeled as "Apocrypha" in Protestant Bibles like the King James Version today, and sometimes tucked into their own separate section. In Catholic Bibles, they're viewed as canon, just part of the Bible.
A few whole books are deuterocanonical (Tobit's my favorite, but Ecclesiasticus/Sirach and Maccabees are too), but so are a few sections of books - a bit of Esther, and two kinda sorta unrelated chunks of Daniel.
And one of those chunks is a detective story.
Most of Daniel is set up as something like a book of prophecy, although a slightly weird one. It includes an apocalypse (Daniel 7-12) as well as prophecies against (and dream interpretations for) oppressive rulers, and a couple miracle stories - surviving a night with lions, having friends who hang out in furnaces without getting burned, interpreting magic words written by mysterious floating hands.
It's a lot for one guy to be doing, so it seems kinda likely that there was a "Daniel tradition" of stories, that he was a character or culture hero following the Babylonian captivity who would be involved in all kinds of different adventures.
The Daniel in most Protestant Bibles ends at the end of the apocalyptic section, in chapter 12. Chapter 13, though, has the story of Susanna, a virtuous woman who is framed by corrupt judges.
Young Daniel - and this seems to be a kind of flashback to early adventures, since Daniel is described as a "young boy" here, after a few years of adventures and visions in the earlier chapters - comes to save the girl from an unjust execution using the holy power of logical deduction.
The climax of the story is an independent cross-examination of suspects. It's surprisingly... modern-feeling. It's a quick read, too. Have fun with it. (And don't skip the footnotes!)
The next chapter, Bel and the Dragon, is even more modern-feeling - the first half (the Bel section) is a locked-room mystery.
It's fun imagining these stories being told aloud. In general - and this is a subjective opinion - deuterocanonical stuff feels a lot more prosy and novelistic to me.