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

Beatrice Lestrange Bradley

Gender: Female

Famous psychologist, honorary PhD at several universities, but eccentric and very unsympathetic. Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, resident in Wandles Parva, a little village in Hampshire, is middle-aged, has black hair, a masculine build and a narrow face which can assume a snake-like appearance. She has been married and has children, but she devotes her interest to solving cases in novels by...

Further reading