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.
Literary figure
Continental Op
Gender: Male
His name is never mentioned, but he is employed at the major private detective agency The Continental Agency’s offices in San Francisco and he solves crime all over the United States. Little is known about him apart from the fact that he is a good investigator, that he is unmarried and the he describes himself as “fat and forty”. He is the principal character in a string of short stories by Dashi...