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

MacDougal Duff

Gender: Male

Mac Duff, as he is known by his friends, is a professor of History, based in New York and Michigan. Charlotte Armstrong wrote three whodunits about him early in her career. MacDougal Duff is tall and thin, with large knotty hands, and is rather abrupt in his manner and his speech. He doesn’t have much of a profile but he is an original amateur detective who solves murder mysteries by, for e...

Further reading