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Theme article

History of crime fiction

By: Johan Wopenka

Depending upon how one wishes to define the concept ‘crime fiction’, it is possible to trace its history and roots back in time. When Dorothy L. Sayers compiled her comprehensive three-volume anthology Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928–34) she started with two stories from the Old Testament, and when Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee (alias Ellery Queen) wrote their fundamental The Detective Short Story : A Bibliography (1942), they listed eight Chinese collections of short stories which are believed to have been written down between 600 A.D. and 1800 A.D., some of them containing stories based on an older, oral tradition.

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Literary figure

Edward Thackeray

Gender: Male

A patient and stoic detective constable at Scotland Yard during the Victorian era. He works side-by-side with his superior Sergeant Cribb in a suite of historical whodunits by Peter Lovesey. Edward Thackeray is dutiful and conscientious, but somewhat lacking in imagination, and he finds it hard to always keep up with Cribb’s reasoning. Besides, he is bad at spelling, which causes a number of e...

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