The article is devoted to the study of the impact of Western literature translations on the development of the detective genre in China. Active introduction of China to the Western tradition in the late 19th - early 20th century led to the emergence of a large amount of translated literature. Writers of the first half of the 20th century were innovators, they borrowed in many respects from the form of Western detective stories, which was a rather natural phenomenon considering the necessity to accumulate experience for the creation of a distinct style. A new private detective hero appeared - Huo Sang in Cheng Xiaoqing’s novellas, Li Fei in Lu Tan’an’s stories, Song Wuqi in Zhang Biwu’s stories, as well as the ‘anti-detective’ gentleman thief Lu Ping in Sun Liaohong’s works. Although the names of these writers are not very well known, precisely their works lay the foundation for further development of the detective genre in Chinese literature.