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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

Ambrose Chitterwick

Gender: Male

A very different detective hero: a mild-eyed, very discreet elderly English gentleman with a totally nondescript appearance. This doesn’t prevent amateur criminologist Ambrose Chitterwick – to the great annoyance of Scotland Yard’s top brass – from solving a handful really tricky murder cases in books by Anthony Berkeley (Cox). How he actually succeeds in achieving this is a mystery, not least for...

Further reading