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

Handsome (Bonifacius) Kusak

Gender: Male

He is tall and broad-shouldered, and looks like a film star – which is what he dreams of becoming. But Bonifacius ‘Handsome’ Kusak – his surname is sometimes written as Kuzak, and in Swedish translations he is called ‘Snyggis’ – is a photographer with little money who travels around with his colleague ‘Bingo’ Riggs and is forever getting into difficulties which force them to be detectives in books...

Further reading