Crime Writers

Photo: Leif R Jansson / FLT PICA/TT

Sample of authors

Grafton, Sue

Sue Taylor Grafton was an American author of detective novels born in Louisville, Kentucky. Her father, Cornelius Warren Grafton, was a lawyer and author, and her mother a high school chemistry teacher. C.W. Grafton was the author of four novels, three detective stories and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1950), a courtroom novel and minor classic.
Both Grafton’s parents developed a drinking p...

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

Jimmie Haswell

Gender: Male

A jolly young criminal lawyer, working in London. He has a minor role in the English writer Herbert Adams’ first crime novel, The Secret of Bogey House, but subsequently solves tricky cases in more than half a dozen whodunits, and is then more active as a detective than as a lawyer. In his free time, Haswell plays golf and quietly flirts with young ladies until he finally marries one of them.

Further reading