Meny

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.

Further reading

Literary figure

Tiger Mann

Gender: Male

He was actually christened Tiger, and is an arch-reactionary secret agent in a handful of novels by Mickey Spillane. Mann reminds one a lot of Spillane’s hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer, but there are some elements of James Bond in him too. During the war, he was active in the OSS, and was then recruited by a private, secret organisation which provides ‘heavy’ support for American projects inter...

Further reading