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

Lucius Leffing

Gender: Male

He loves everything Victorian, and has furnished his house in accordance with that. Lucius Leffing is an occult amateur detective, a ‘ghost-hunter’ who combats evil and supernatural adversaries in a number of books, primarily collections of short stories. He is unobtrusive, tall and slim, with a finely-chiselled face complete with moustache. Like his creator, Joseph Payne Brenna, he lives in New H...

Further reading