Colin Dexter is a bookish and mild-mannered Englishman who likes a quiet pint of beer and favors bulky cardigans. If you saw him in a pub (and that is where you are likely to find him, sensible fellow), you would never guess that he is personally responsible for 68 cold-blooded murders.

Of course, this being England, the murders are all fictitious-most of them the work of overstressed Oxford dons and other cerebral types who fill the pages of Dexter's hugely successful series of Inspector Morse novels.

In reality, the number of murders in Oxford in the last 100 years barely matches the number of people Dexter has bumped off in a mere dozen Inspector Morse novels, and it is almost certainly true that the scale, variety, and ingenuity of homicides in British whodunits vastly exceed anything that happens in the real world.

The fact is, the British are not much good at violent crime. Almost any large American city experiences more murders every year that the whole of the United Kingdom. So why do the British have so much malice in their hearts-or at least in the pages of their light reading? Goodness knows. Great Britain produces about 1,000 crime novels a year, more that any other nation. Add in all the mysteries and thrillers imported form America, Australia, Europe, and elsewhere, and the number rises by hundreds more. There is, in short, a seemingly inexhaustible market for crime fiction in Britain-and it has been that way for a very, very long time.

Edgar Allen Poe is often credited with creating the genre of mystery fiction with his 1841 story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," but this is not quite true. Although Poe's story established several of the conventions of detective fictions-a puzzling crime, a thorough investigation, an unexpected but satisfying outcome-there already existed in Britain a category of crime fiction known as the Newgate novels (Newgate being the main London prison until its demolition in 1902), consisting mostly of lurid fictionalizations of real-life crimes-and even these were old hat. Indeed as far back as 1798, before Poe was even born, Jane Austen had a character in Northanger Abbey complaining that all her friends spent their time reading "horrid mystery novels."

In any case, Americans more or less abandoned the field after Poe and never really got back in the game until well into this century. It was the British who took up the cudgels, as it were. In 1868, the English novelist Wilkie Collins produced The Moonstone, still regarded by many critics as the finest detective novel ever written, and even Charles Dickens dabbled in the field. His Mystery of Edwin Drood was just that-a mystery, made all the more so by its being unfinished at the time of his death-and even the more conventionally literary Bleak House was part detective story, with a plodding Inspector Bucket, who inaugurated the time-honored practice of assembling the suspects and outlining his deductions in front of them.

But the real breakthrough-the big bang, so to speak-of British crime fiction came in late 1877, when a volume called Beeton's Christmas Annual hit the newsstands of London. A compilation of stories, poems, puzzles, and other light entertainment, Beeton's was one of dozens of such books published every Christmas in Britain, and would now be quite forgotten except that it contained a story called "A Study in Scarlet," about a remarkable sleuth named Sherlock Holmes, written by a not very successful young doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle.

Mystery fiction would never be the same again. Here was a fully drawn central character-haughty, irascible, wildly eccentric, but wholly convincing and real. It is a testament to Doyle's skills that even now, hundreds of people a year show up at 221b Baker Street in London hoping to see the home of a man who never existed. Features that would become standard devices of English detective novels-a protagonist of great erudition, classical learning, idiosyncratic behavior, and an unerring ability to find a logical solution to the most bewildering of crimes, working in partnership with a well-meaning but comparatively slow-witted sidekick-were born with Holmes. Above all, Doyle made the detective story respectable.

In no time at all, some of the best writers in Britain were applying their skills to the most rewarding of fields-Robert Louis Stevenson with The Wrong Box, G.K. Chesterton with his Father Brown stories, Arnold Bennett with The Night Visitor, J.B. Priestly with the play An Inspector Calls. Even A.A. Milne, of Winnie the Pooh fame, wrote a successful though now forgotten effort called The Red House Mystery. Soon there was a whole crew of full-time mystery writers-Josephine Tey, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh (actually a New Zealander but for some reason invariably bracketed with English mystery writers by everyone except, presumably, New Zealanders), Eric Ambler, Margery Allingham, and scores more.