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

Archy (Archibald) McNally

Gender: Male

He was thrown out of Yale Law School, but daddy Prescott still employed him in his respectable law firm, where the son got to carry out ‘discreet investigations’. He meets with amazing successes, mainly on account of his somewhat unorthodox working methods, according to author Lawrence Sanders. ‘Archy’ McNally is almost 40 years old, talks like a teenager and loves women, clothes and hats.

Further reading