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

Henri Bencolin

Gender: Male

Bencolin is a sardonic gentleman, with a high position in the Paris police force and is described as a ‘Mephistopheles smoking a cigar’. Little is known about his background and private life, but he is described as rather unfeeling, even cruel, and lives entirely for solving what are called ‘impossible crimes’ in John Dickson Carr’s earliest novels with elements of horror. On occasion, Bencolin is...

Further reading