Crime Writers

Foto: Peter Peitsch (2009) / www.peitschphoto.com

Sample of authors

Arjouni, Jakob

Pseudonym for the German author and dramatist Jakob Bothe. He was born as Jakob Michelsen in Frankfurt am Main as the son of dramatist Hans Günter Michelsen and publisher Ursula Bothe, and later formally adopted his mother’s surname as his own. He grew up in Frankfurt and Ober-Roden in Hesse, matriculated from the Odenwaldschule elite school in 1983 and subsequently settled in Montpelier in Fr...

Further reading

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 figures

Samuel Behrens

Gender: Male

Together with his colleague Daniel Calder, he forms one of the most lethal teams in British counter intelligence. Otherwise, he is an elderly, typically British gentleman, who busies himself with bee-keeping, plays chess and lives with an aunty in a little village in the county of Kent. Samuel Behrens is a linguistic expert, but like Calder is also a skilled car-driver and a clever detective,...

Further reading