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

Kate (Katarina) Martinelli

Gender: Female

Author Laurie R. King has graced her police detective Katarina Martinelli with two nicknames: she is called Kate by her friends and herself, but Casey by her colleagues in the San Francisco police department. She is around 30 years old, dark, in good physical shape and 167 cm tall. She is lesbian, and lives in a complicated relationship with her partner Leonora ‘Lee’ Cooper. Kate usually works tog...

Further reading