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
Claude Warrington-Reeve
Gender: Male
An eminent defence lawyer in London, who is expert at getting wrongly suspected defendants freed in sensational cases. Claude Warrington-Reeve is middle-aged, energetic and strict, and a clever detective when it comes to finding clues which the police have missed. He does, however, get on well with Chief Inspector Steven Mitchell from Scotland Yard, and together they solve cases in three of...