You are basically right. Murder mystery books, in Western literature (I will not address the existence of such works in other cultures, such as the Chinese Gong'an stories from the 17th-18th centuries), are a recent invention dating from the early 19th century. When Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes in 1887, he continued an already fruitful tradition inaugurated by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841 with The Murders in the Rue Morgue, generally considered as the first work of the genre (Knight, 2004; Priestman, 2013). Poe's stories introduced, or at least combined, many of its tropes: the mysterious murder, the excentric detective, the puzzle solving etc. They were commercially successful and inspired other authors, notably Emile Gaboriau in France (starting in 1867) and Conan Doyle in the UK. Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) is also considered to be a pioneering work in this genre. From the mid-1850s, many European writers dabbled in crime fiction, mystery fiction, and their variants ("sensation fiction"), with or without detective heroes, occasionally drawing on other types of fiction. Ponson du Terrail's Rocambole begins his literary life as a murdering villain (1857) and becomes a vigilante-detective in the last novels of the series. Georges Delabruyère's La Comtesse Noire (1886) combines a whodunit, a detective-journalist and his plucky sidekick, melodrama, colonial adventures, thrilling action, and erotica (the villain is a mixed-race cross-dressing rich woman who enjoys rough sex with slaughterhouse workers).

Though Poe's Murders was definitely groundbreaking, and recognized as such immediately, it did not come out of thin air. Van Leer (1993) considers that Poe's "detective devices" - the mystery, the problem-solving notably - could already be found in popular works of the 18th and early 19th century, and that their popularity had obscured the actual originality of Poe's Dupin tales. For instance, Jane Austen's Emma (1815) has been called by none other than P.D. James a "detective story" without a murder: the book is peppered with clues about its central mystery, the secret engagement of Frank Churchill to Jane Fairfax, that only the attentive reader can pick up (Bell, 2007). Another stepstone of the evolution of crime writing in the early 19th century is the more or less fictionalized memoirs of François Vidocq (1828-1829), a former criminal who founded the Sureté Nationale police force under Napoléon and then a private detective agency. Vidocq's colourful personality and investigative methods, which included "detection" as well as disguising his men to entrap criminals, made him a celebrity and the model of numerous fictional characters (including both Jean Valjean and Javert in Hugo's Les Misérables). The concept of "detective" as a specific police activity was taking shape in England and France in the early to mid-1800s and helped with the popularity of crime fiction that focused on the crime-solver rather than on the criminals.

Indeed, the appearance of the detective novel was the latest development in the long history of crime writing - fictional or not, which had been available to the public in Europe since the Renaissance. In 16th century England, the increasingly literate population benefited from a thriving production of popular literature, which, under the form of broadside ballads, pamphlets, and books, provided news, fiction, and religious literature. People could read avidly about wars, religious controversies, and the occasional two-headed calf, but also about robberies and murders described in gory detail, such as the killing - and then quartering, disembowelment, perboiling, and salting - of a Mr Trat, curate of Old Cleeve, Somerset, in 1623 (cited by Marshburn and Velie, 1973).

The crying Murther: Contayning the cruell and most horrible Butchery of Mr. TRAT, Curate of olde Cleaue; who was first murthered as he trauailed vpon the high way, then was brought home to his house and there was quartered and imboweld: his quarters and bowels being afterwards perboyld and salted vp, in a most strange and fearefull manner. For this fact the Iudgement of my Lord chiefe Baron TANFIELD, young Peter Smethwicke, Andrew Baker, Cyrill Austen, and Alice Walker, were executed this last Summer Assizes, the 24. of Iuly, at Stone Gallowes, neere Taunton in Summerset-shire. (NSFW woodcut)

In France, in addition to cheap pamphlets ("canards") of similar nature, an entire genre was created in the mid-16th century that consisted in large collections of "tragical stories" that targeted a more educated public. These ultra-violent tales were framed by moral introduction and conclusions. There was no mystery: good people met bad people who hurt or killed them, and God saw that the bad people were punished even more gruesomely. Numerous authors produced volume after volume of such tales. In François de Rosset's Histoires tragiques de notre temps, a best-seller reprinted 40 times from 1614 to 1757, a young woman avenges herself on the man who shot her lover to death with an arquebus:

Fleurie draws a small knife and pierces his eyes, then pulls them out of his head. She cuts off his nose and ears, and assisted by the valet, pulls out his teeth and nails and separates his fingers one by one. The unfortunate man struggles and tries to disentangle himself, but he only gets bound tighter. Finally, after she had practised a thousand kinds of cruelty on his wretched body, thrown hot coals into his breast and uttered all the abusive words that rage teaches to those who have lost humanity, she took a large knife, cut open his stomach and ripped out his heart, which she threw into the fire that she had previously lit in this room.

Fleurie commits suicide, but she remains the positive hero of the story (the servant who helped her ends up on the wheel, though).

The most prolific author of these types of stories was Jean-Pierre Camus, a theologian who was for twenty years Bishop of Belley, in Northern France. Camus wrote a lot: 265 books including 21 collections of "tragical stories" and countless novels and religious essays (he had a thing against monks). His best sellers - tens of thousands of copies were sold in the first half of the 17th century - were his criminal tales, notably Les Spectacles d'horreur (The horror shows) and L'Amphithéâtre sanglant (The bloody amphitheatre). He wrote almost a thousand of these stories, that he usually presented as true. Like Rosset's tales, they were supposed to be moral tales meant to warn people about the works of the Devil. Camus, however, was a more talented writer, and it is unmistakable that he did not let his moralizing objectives get too much in a way of a good story. And we can find some proto-detective action in some of these stories, such as "The blind witness" (from the Spectacles d'Horreur, 1630, see The evolution of a crime story below)!

Without going into too much detail, the 18th and early 19h century were still rich in crime literature. Its structure remained "binary and moralistic", following the criminals from crime to punishment (Muchembled, 2008): the titillating accounts of gory murders ended with no less gruesome descriptions of executions. The popular Newgate Calendar, that provided its readers in the second half of the 18th century with tales of true crimes, started as a monthly bulletin of executions. This did not prevent the existence of a more transgressive literature, where bandits (more or less fictionalized) were turned into popular heroes. In France, the highwayman Cartouche ended on the wheel in 1721 and became a Robin Hood figure whose exploits were celebrated in ballads and prints.

Crime fiction, or fictionalized true crime, were still a hot thing when detective fiction appeared in the mid-1800s. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975) has argued that the switch from these earlier forms of crime writing to the detective form corresponded to a novel perspective on crime, which had somehow leveled up in term of social status. Palatable and "heroic" crimes worth writing about were no longer those of the common people, but were given to more respectable, smarter heroes:

It was not only the broadsheets that disappeared with the birth of a literature of crime; the glory of the rustic malefactor and his sombre transformation into a hero went with them. The man of the people was now too simple to be the protagonist of subtle truths. In this genre, there were no more popular heroes or great executions; the criminal was wicked, of course, but he was also intelligent; and although he was punished, he did not have to suffer. The literature of crime transposes to another social class the spectacle that had surrounded the criminal. Meanwhile the newspapers took over the task of recounting the grey, unheroic details of everyday crime and punishment. The split was complete; the people was robbed of its old pride in its crimes; the great murders had become the quiet game of the wellbehaved.

Robert Muchembled (2008) holds a slightly different opinion: for him, the evolution of crime fiction reflected new forms of crime, more urban, resulting from the emergence of social classes perceived as "dangerous". The central figure of the lonely vigilante, acting outside the law (or within the law like Vidocq, but he was himself a rogue), provided a reassuring, protecting figure to the populations who saw themselves threatened by the young and miserable. In any case, throughout the 19th century, detective literature was just one genre among many - serials "saturated with murders and vengeances", court reporting with blow-by-blow accounts, grand-guignol theatre plays - that put violence within reach of the general public, but in a safe and exciting way.

->Annex: The murder of the Lucchese merchant