Best known for his mystery novels, Poe was one of the earliest American writers of short story, and he is generally regarded as the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction (James et al. 2003:18). He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career (Meyers and Jeffery, 1992: paperback). Over the past twenty years, Chinese mystery novels have developed prosperously, which also need to become better to shine the Chinese literature. This thesis will briefly introduce some influence of western mystery novels, especially Edgar Allan Poe’s works, on Chinese mystery novels firstly. And then the differences between the West and Chinese mystery novels will be focused on in this article. Finally, some suggestions will be put forward for the development of Chinese mystery novels. 

2. Literature Review

     Since Edgar Allan Poe and other western writers who focus on writing mystery novels created lots of masterpieces in the 19th and 20th century, Chinese writers, of course, are difficult to be superior to them. However, for Chinese creations, there emerge a number of works different from western works. There are a plenty of Chinese elements that can be used when writers create and establish their works. As Na Duo, a famous writers in China, said, Chinese novelists working on mystery novels completely have the ability to find and make use of Chinese nations’ culture to write great eastern mystery novels not only characterized with our national style but also popular all over the world, which makes Chinese mystery novels famous to more and more people. 

2.1 The Definition of Mystery Novel

Mystery novel is created with its inflected plot to put forward development of story. The whole novel is successful based on being guided by its strong suspense and rigorous logical reasoning. Chinese mystery novel is imported goods which are the result of borrowing the marrow of European and American black suspense novels. European and American black suspense novels appeared in the 1940s developed from private detective novels, popular in the 1950s and 1960s in the west. These novels focused on analyzing the mystery background and criminals’ psychological conditions instead of solving crimes and punishing criminals seriously. These novels are created depending on some mystery events, which is different from traditional detective novels (Huang Lushan, 2003:365).