The Rise and Fall of the British Detective Novel (2010)
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
Robert Harris comes to mind too.
If the point is that whodunit has moved on, so has almost every other genre.
Released on 2 September 2025, it is the eighth book in the Cormoran Strike series of detective fiction novels, following The Running Grave."
Furthermore, given what's surrounding its author, there's a non-negligible part of the readers community that won't read it, just because of its author. And it can be seen as _risky_ to read anything she publishes. During a party, someone decided to stop talking to me once I told I was currently reading a book in the series (we were discussing our current reading, so I wasn't trying to do anything smart here). On the other hand, I doubt there's people still buying her books just to _own the libs_.
Sure, it helped launching the series, but if there's still thousands people reading it after more than a decade, maybe it's because those people like it. Maybe.
1) In the grand scheme of world literature, JKR’s books are comparative trash. It’s also well-established that the first book was not successful until the real identity of the author was shared.
2) Harry Potter (and all of the related activity) is still hugely popular, despite JKR’s unpleasant views and behaviour related to trans people. Most people in the world aren’t locked into the online zeitgeist.
But like you point out, there's been a zillion other "rises" too. Maybe a more acurate but much longer article would be "the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise [...] of the British detective novel"
“Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! But, indeed, if you are trivial, I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools.
-- From "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Every kid should be given a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes canon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_of_Sherlock_Holmes) This will turn them towards learning and practicing "The Art of Deduction (or Ratiocination according to Edgar Allan Poe)" like nothing else and will directly lead to them understanding the importance of Logic and Science/Mathematics in today's world.
For example, as a kid growing up in 80s India, i read whatever i could get my hands on (eg. Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Enid Blyton, Alistair Maclean, Desmond Bagley, Frederick Forsyth etc. etc.) but none of them really made a mark. Then somebody gave me a copy of "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes" and i was zapped. Here was somebody who focused on reasoning and showed you the steps involved. Of course once you grew-up you realized that much of the "Deductions" were far-fetched/implausible but nevertheless the fire was lit. It directly led to my interest in Science/Mathematics and then a career in Software (much of Holmes' methods are directly applicable to Debugging).
[0] https://github.com/benrutter/wimsey / https://codeberg.org/benrutter/wimsey
The "mystery" was how the detective was going to figure it out.
There's a good piece on that form here: https://mysteriesahoy.com/2019/01/26/five-to-try-inverted-my...
https://www.goodreads.com/series/59006-dr-david-audley-colon...
Ann Cleeves
Robert Galbraith
Richard Osman
Tim Sullivan
Janice Hallett
Ian Rankin
JR Ellis
Alexander McCall Smith
And those are authors I'm reading because they were featured on some Kindle lists.
This course, which I took a while back, was curiously extremely focused on pulp detective novels. I got the sense that it was a tenured professors hobby or something. Interesting, nonetheless.