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
Jack (Flashgun) Casey
Gender: Male
Protagonist in a suite of hard-boiled detective stories by George Harmon Coxe. The tall, heavily built and dark-haired Jack Casey - called "Flashgun" or just "Flash" - is a skilled but temperamental press photographer who is struggling with an injured knee. He ages somewhat in the books - is between 30 and 45 years old - and is skilled when it comes to solving cases with the help of, among other...