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

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...

Further reading