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
George Palmer-Jones
Gender: Male
Mr Palmer-Jones is a retired English government civil servant and an enthusiastic amateur ornithologist who travels around Great Britain together with his wife to look at birds. It is a happy marriage, but Palmer-Jones has a problem with a certain inferiority complex and a fear of doing something wrong. It doesn’t, however, prevent him from solving murder mysteries in whodunits by Ann Cleeves.