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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.

Further reading

Literary figure

Desmond Merrion

Gender: Male

During the First World War, he worked in the British military intelligence service. Then Desmond Merrion became a private detective and solves a large number of cases that his creator Miles Burton (pseudonym for Cecil Street) has written about. He usually works together with Scotland Yard detective Henry Arnold. Merrion is of short stature, is well-built, looks often as though he is bored and is...

Further reading