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
Mici Anhalt
Gender: Female
She has been a ballerina and worked at a prosecutor’s office, but now Mici (pronounced as ‘Mitzi’) Anhalt is employed by a department which appraises damages for victims of crime. In the books by Lillian O’Donnell, she is, however, foremost an enthusiastic amateur detective. She is beautiful, has ‘golden-red’ hair, and having grown up in the 1960s has had a varied sex life, some left-wing sympathi...