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
Henry Poggioli
Gender: Male
Psychogist, philosopher and – not least – criminologist. Dr Henry Poggioli, employed by Ohio State University, is a versatile gentleman who, with the help of psychology, solves mysteries in various place in and outside the USA – albeit rarely in Ohio. Little is known about him personally: he is a bachelor, good-looking, but he ages quite a lot over the years. T.S. Stribling wrote a long series of...