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

Tim Frazer

Gender: Male

An English engineer, part-owner of a little firm that goes bankrupt because of his partner’s extravagant habits. Instead, Tim Frazer became a secret agent and ‘spy hunter’ for a similarly secret British security service, and is successful in that role. He is young, handsome, is linguistically very gifted and has no family of his own. When Francis Durbridge’s novels about him were turned into a TV...

Further reading