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
Tish (Letitia) Carberry
Gender: Female
A jolly and good-hearted middle-aged spinster, who lives on money she has inherited, and lodges with a nephew, Charlie Sands. She is the main character in a whole row of short stories (but no novels) by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Together with her friends Aggie Pilkington and Lizzie Wilkins, Tish Carberry often goes travelling, which leads to her becoming involved in various dramatic events, which...