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
Knud Ejnarsen
Gender: Male
A boorish, prejudiced, aggressive and heavy-handed police detective in the Danish ‘Rejsehold’, a sort of Danish FBI. He would have been insufferable if he hadn’t functioned as an excellent complement to his colleague Jonas Mørck, who is his complete opposite. The dialogues between the two in Poul Ørum’s books are deeply human, and the well-built, somewhat overweight Knud Ejnarsen, who sweats quite...