Crime Writers

Photo: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images (1970)

Sample of authors

Moyes, Patricia

Patricia Moyes was born Patricia Pakenham-Walsh in Dublin, Ireland. She was educated at Overstone School in Northampton 1934–39 and served in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) during the Second World War, achieving the rank of flight officer. After the war she was hired by Peter Ustinov as an assistant after which she was assistant editor of English Vogue between 1953 and 1958. She spent a la...

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

Tommy (Thomas) Lynley

Gender: Male

Thomas Lynley is a Scotland Yard detective inspector. He is also the eighth Earl of Asherton, he is rich, well educated and good looking. Not everybody appreciates his aristocratic background, including his sergeant, Barbara Havers, which does not prevent the two from making a formidable team. According to the author, Elizabeth George, they respect each other’s idiosyncrasies. Lynley features in a...

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