Crime Writers

Photo: Ola Erikson / Forflex (2014)

Sample of authors

Beckett, Simon

English author whose crime novels have become more popular in other countries – including Scandinavia and Germany – than at home. Simon Beckett was born in a working-class family in Sheffield, and graduated with a B.A. in English from Sheffield Polytechnic (now Hallam University) and subsequently gained an M.A. at Newcastle University. He then worked for several years as a janitor and for a whi...

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

Arsène Lupin

Gender: Male

The name of this gentleman thief and amateur detective is Raoul d’Andrèsy, but he is better known to readers of the French author Maurice Leblanc’s stories as Arsène Lupin. The classic, fiendishly cunning thief is a classic character in mystery fiction, he even dupes Sherlock Holmes (alias Herlock Sholmes). After Leblanc’s death his character has been taken over by other authors.

Further reading