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

Jill Francis

Gender: Female

The young journalist, Jill Francis, leaves London after breaking up from a relationship with a married man. She gets a job in the fictive town of Lydmouth, where she investigates and writes about a row of crimes. She also meets police detective Richard Thornhill, and the two – reluctantly – start an affair even though he is a married father of two. Andrew Taylor has written the books about the cou...

Further reading