Crime Writers

Photo: Ola Erikson / Forflex (2019)

Sample of authors

Engberg, Katrine

Katrine Engberg was born in Copenhagen where she also grew up in a cultural academic family. She trained to be a dancer and for a long time had a successful dancing career, for example at Det Kongelige Teater, and as a choreographer and director.
Katrine Engberg lives in the centre of Copenhagen with her husband and children. Following the great success of her crime novels, she is now a...

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

John Rebus

Gender: Male

Rebus is a Scottish detective who usually works in Edinburgh where most of Ian Rankin’s novels about him are set. Rebus is a loner with cooperation issues and he is not always popular with his superiors. He has a drinking problem, he was born in Cardenden, Fife, in 1947 and he has no interest in politics. Rebus eventually retires from his job, but returns to join a cold case team.

Further reading