Crime Writers

Photo: Robert Ahlbom / Forflex

Sample of authors

Mosley, Walter

American author, born in the tough and run-down South Central district in Los Angeles. His mother had a Russian-Jewish background and his father was Afro-American. Walter Mosley had at first an irregular school life, but his mother encouraged him to read, even classic literature. In 1964, the family moved to Westside in Los Angeles, and in 1970 he matriculated from Alexander Hamilton High...

Further reading

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 figures

Matthew Hope

Gender: Male

Lawyer Matthew Hope moves with his wife Susan and daughter Joanna from Chicago to Calusa in Florida to work with commercial law for a small law firm. But nothing goes as he wished: thanks to his detective talents, he unwillingly becomes a leading criminal lawyer and his marriage ends in divorce, as we read in the books by Ed McBain (pseudonym for Evan Hunter).

Further reading