Detective in the context of "Detective fiction"

Watchmen were organised groups of men, usually authorised by a state, government, city, or society, to deter criminal activity and provide law enforcement as well as traditionally perform the services of public safety, fire watch, crime prevention, crime detection, and recovery of stolen goods. Watchmen have existed since earliest recorded times in various guises throughout the world and were generally succeeded by the emergence of formally organised professional policing.

Columbo is an American crime drama television series starring Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo, a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. After two pilot episodes in 1968 and 1971, the show originally aired on NBC from 1971 to 1978 as one of the rotating programs of The NBC Mystery Movie. Columbo then aired on ABC as a rotating program on The ABC Mystery Movie from 1989 to 1990, and on a less frequent basis from 1990 to 2003.

Columbo is a shrewd and exceptionally observant homicide detective whose trademarks include his rumpled beige raincoat, unassuming demeanor, cigar, battered Peugeot 403 car, love of chili, and unseen wife (whom he mentions frequently). He often leaves a room only to return with the catchphrase "Just one more thing" to ask a critical question.

Mystery is a fiction genre where the nature of an event, usually a murder or other crime, remains mysterious until the end of the story. Often within a closed circle of suspects, each suspect is usually provided with a credible motive and a reasonable opportunity for committing the crime. The central character is often a detective (such as Sherlock Holmes), who eventually solves the mystery by logical deduction from facts presented to the reader. Some mystery books are non-fiction. Mystery fiction can be detective stories in which the emphasis is on the puzzle or suspense element and its logical solution such as a whodunit. Mystery fiction can be contrasted with hardboiled detective stories, which focus on action and gritty realism.

Mystery fiction can involve a supernatural mystery in which the solution does not have to be logical and even in which there is no crime involved. This usage was common in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, whose titles such as Dime Mystery, Thrilling Mystery, and Spicy Mystery offered what were then described as complicated to solve and weird stories: supernatural horror in the vein of Grand Guignol. That contrasted with parallel titles of the same names which contained conventional hardboiled crime fiction. The first use of "mystery" in that sense was by Dime Mystery, which started out as an ordinary crime fiction magazine but switched to "weird menace" during the later part of 1933.

Jane Marple, better known as Miss Marple, is a fictional character in Agatha Christie's crime novels and short stories. Miss Marple lives in the fictional English village of St Mary Mead and acts as an amateur consulting detective. Often characterised as an elderly spinster, she is one of Christie's best-known characters and has been portrayed numerous times on screen. Her first appearance was in a short story published in The Royal Magazine in December 1927, "The Tuesday Night Club", which later became the first chapter of The Thirteen Problems (1932). Her first appearance in a full-length novel was in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930 and her last appearance was in Sleeping Murder in 1976.

In the United States, a special agent is an official title used to refer to certain investigators or detectives of federal, military, tribal, or state agencies who primarily serve in criminal investigatory positions. Additionally, some special agents operate in criminal intelligence, counterterrorism, or counterintelligence-based roles as well, with one or all of these roles occasionally taking precedence over criminal investigatory tasks.

Within the American federal law enforcement system, dozens of federal agencies employ federal law enforcement officers (LEOs), each with different criteria pertaining to the use of the titles special agent and agent. Most criminal investigators employed by the U.S. Department of Defense and its component departments typically utilize the title of "special agent."

The Naked Gun is a media franchise based on the TV show Police Squad!, consisting of American crime spoof-slapstick comedy films, created by the comedy filmmaking trio Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker. It includes one television series, four theatrical films and a video game. The series centers on a bumbling police detective who solves criminal cases in comical fashion. Leslie Nielsen stars in the television series and the first three films as the protagonist Detective Sergeant Frank Drebin; a fourth film starring Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. was released in 2025. Critics have praised the TV series and the films, all four of which have been financially successful.

A whodunit (less commonly spelled as whodunnit; a colloquial elision of "Who [has] done it?") is a complex plot-driven variety of detective fiction in which the puzzle regarding who committed the crime is the main focus. The reader or viewer is provided with the clues to the case, from which the identity of the perpetrator may be deduced before the story provides the revelation itself at its climax. The investigation is usually conducted by an eccentric, amateur, or semi-professional detective.

Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to limit disclosure as to the origins of an investigation.

In the US, a particular form is evidence laundering, where one police officer obtains evidence via means that are in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and then passes it on to another officer, who builds on it and gets it accepted by the court under the good-faith exception as applied to the second officer. This practice gained support after the Supreme Court's 2009 Herring v. United States decision.