There was a time when famous real life detectives wrote their memoirs (or had them ghostwritten), and these often turned out to be far more works of fiction than faithful representations of their true great moments of crime-solving. Francois Vidocq, for example, who helped create the Surete in Paris, the first relatively modern police force, produced a four-volume memoir that made him appear to be the greatest detective who ever lived. In fact, he mainly relied on informants.

The Pinkerton Detective Agency, primarily in the person of Allan Pinkerton, became famous throughout the country largely due to best-selling books about his various adventures as a union buster and crime fighter, but few of the incidents recounted in those books (“Express-Man and the Detectives,” “The Molly Maguires and the Detectives,” and so on) happened quite the way his autobiographical works attest.

In recent years, a new type of detective hero has emerged. In these stories, real-life people from another era take time away from their writing jobs to accomplish some very impressive detective work. Though utterly untrained in police methodology, they nevertheless bring justice to those who behave with criminal intent.

It’s hard to think of a major literary figure who hasn’t been used as a fictional detective: Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Ambrose Bierce, Dorothy Parker, and even, improbably, Agatha Christie, have all done serious sleuthing. With all that crime-fighting, you have to wonder how they ever found time to get to their quills and typewriters to actually write books.

A lovely example of an author using a historical entity as a protagonist, rather than creating his own character, is in Leonard Tourney’s “Time’s Fool” (Forge, 320 pages, $24.95), which features none other than William Shakespeare. In this enchanting thriller, the greatest playwright in the history of the world encounters a terrible problem. Though happily married to Ann Hathaway, he once had an affair with a beautiful woman for whom he wrote at least one immortal sonnet.

Years later, he has prospered while she has become a desperate ruin, and she requests a meeting with her old lover – the purpose of which, he quickly learns, is to blackmail him. While they argue about the validity of her claim, a fire bomb is thrown through the window of her shabby apartment, causing her death. A young man witnesses the arson, but he, too, is murdered, and Shakespeare himself is suspected of the crime. In order to clear himself, he must discover the identity of the perpetrator.

In spite of recent photographs that suggest otherwise, I was not alive in the early years of the 17th century, when the incidents in the book occur, so I cannot with first-hand certainty attest to the accuracy of the dialogue. But, to these ears, it seems pretty authentic. Of course, spelling was different four centuries ago, and so was a great deal of the vocabulary, but it all has the ring of another era. From the prologue, titled “To Whoever Finds This Book,” and the opening line, “Love is bitter and love is sweet, but more bitter than sweet, and a nearer cousin to grief than to pleasure,” this first-person narrative by old Will has a delightfully old-fashioned tone and cadence that should keep you turning the pages with abundant joy.

You might turn the pages of Philippa Morgan’s “Chaucer and the House of Fame” (Carroll & Graf, $25, 341 pages) with a good deal less joy. It’s a handsome book with a delightful dust-jacket illustration by Paolo Uccello, but it all goes downhill from there. Geoffrey Chaucer is the detective in this one, which is set in the 14th century but employs dialogue that sounds more like a writer from the 1950s trying to produce prose like a writer from the 1350s. It’s a long book, and seems a good deal longer than it is.

Since almost as little is known about the life of Chaucer as about Shakespeare, he seems a good subject for a fictional narrative, and what reader can fail to be fascinated by an adventure of this marvelous poet? Well (to answer my own question), I stopped being fascinated a quarter of the way through.

Again, it is the lusty side of a literary god that gets him in trouble. Chaucer, as happily married as Shakespeare, once fell in love with the wife of a French count. When he is asked to fulfill a secret mission for this very same count, he is excited at the prospect of seeing the object of that long-ago passion. But when her husband is killed in an apparent accident while boar-hunting, Chaucer astutely discovers that in fact the count was murdered. He must find a resolution before he can return to England.

Bits of history concerning the Hundred Years War serve as background for this slow-moving tale, which seems appropriate, since I think it took that long to read it.

Much more enjoyable is “Death by Dickens” (Berkley, 280 pages, $23.95), a collection of mystery stories inspired by Charles Dickens and edited by Anne Perry. While most of the stories feature characters from Dickens engaged in activities never suspected by their creator, it is Dickens himself, with his friend Wilkie Collins, who investigates brutal murders in both “Passing Shadow” by Peter Tremayne and “The House of the Red Candle” by Martin Edwards.

Both of these first-rate exploits have a darkness that reflects the style and content of such Dickensian mystery novels as “Bleak House” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” as well as Collins’s “The Woman in White” and “The Moonstone.” It would be an excellent addition to the mystery sections of all good bookstores to find full-length detective stories featuring Dickens and Collins, and both Messrs. Tremayne and Edwards seem up to the task.