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

Gendarmerichef Laviolette

Gender: Male

Laviolette works as the head of the gendarmerie in Provence at the beginning of the 20th century. When readers meet him for the first time, he is investigating a strange case where people have died after using an aphrodisiac, and in which his 17-year-old son turns out to be involved. Pierre Magnan only wrote one more novel about the head of the gendarmerie, but he did write a whole series about...

Further reading