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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

Harry Barnett

Gender: Male

A tired and shabby middle-aged British man with an invalid’s pension, who works as a house caretaker in Greece in Robert Goddard’s first book about him. His major interest is to eat and drink, but for various reasons he becomes involved in a number of criminal cases; in one of them, too, he gets to find out that he has an unknown adult son. He gets married and settles in Vancouver – but is never...

Further reading