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

Mac

Gender: Male

After a childhood in Chicago’s slum district, Mac – which is the only name he is given in Thomas B. Dewey’s hard-boiled novels – becomes a police officer in that same city. However, he solved a crime that gangster bosses and corrupt powerful figures did not want solving, so he was sacked. Now he is a private detective, but still had friends in the police department. He is a skilled investigator, h...

Further reading