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
John Stubbs
Gender: Male
British professor of Botany who is worried about becoming dehydrated, so he drinks large quantities of beer. He also solves murders in a highly personal manner in novels by R.T. Campbell (pseudonym for Ruthven Todd). Professor John Stubbs is of late middle age, vain and self-assured, corpulent, has a moustache, smokes a stinking pipe and interrogates witnesses with the sensitivity of a drunken...