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
Sylvia Plotkin
Gender: Female
She is a warm-hearted, lively, middle-aged, cheerful and divorced teacher and author in Greenwich Village in New York, who struggles with a weight problem and dresses in conspicuously colourful clothes. In three books by George Baxt, Sylvia Plotkin solves crimes together with police officer Max Van Larsen. They are in love with each other, but neither of them dares to admit their feelings for...