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

Pierre Chambrun

Gender: Male

He was born in France and was active in the resistance during the Second World War; now he runs the luxury Beaumont Hotel in New York. Pierre Chambrun is a short bachelor with a square-set body and dark eyes. He demands that everything at the hotel should work perfectly and must for that reason himself solve the crimes that to his horror take place there in the books by Hugh Pentecost (pseudonym...

Further reading