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
Roger Sheringham
Gender: Male
Bestseller-writer and crime reporter, born in 1891, and the main character in a suite of whodunnits by Anthony Berkeley (Cox). Roger Sheringham is short in stature, plump and talkative, smokes a pipe, loves beer and provides explanations for various murder cases – sometimes he is right, sometimes not. In the earliest books, there is something paradoxical about him, but as he grows older he b...