Crime Writers

Photo: Central Press/Hulton Archive via Getty Images (1956)

Sample of authors

Gilbert, Michael

Michael Francis Gilbert was a British author of mystery stories and thrillers. He was born in Billinghay, Lincolnshire, and educated at St. Peter’s School in Seaford, Sussex, and Blundell’s School, Tiverton, Devon, after which he read law at the University of London, graduating in 1937. During the war he served in North Africa and Europe. He was a prisoner of war in North Africa and based his thr...

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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.

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Literary figures

Henri Bencolin

Gender: Male

Bencolin is a sardonic gentleman, with a high position in the Paris police force and is described as a ‘Mephistopheles smoking a cigar’. Little is known about his background and private life, but he is described as rather unfeeling, even cruel, and lives entirely for solving what are called ‘impossible crimes’ in John Dickson Carr’s earliest novels with elements of horror. On occasion, Bencolin is...

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