This an attempt — very much “under construction” — to trace the roots of film noir and neo-neoir. This may as well serve as some kind of a loose timeline for the origins of detective fiction too, until 1941 — the year of The Maltese Falcon. From that year onward, the focus shifts entirely to film noir.
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1748 — Voltaire publishes Zadig, or The Book of Fate
1819 — E.T.A. Hoffmann publishes Das Fraulein von Scuderi (Mademoiselle de Scuderi)
April, 1841 — Edgar Allan Poe creates C. Auguste Dupin, the first true detective in fiction in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, commonly recognised as the first detective story
