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
Hugh Westlake
Gender: Male
When he was only 31 years old, general practitioner Dr Hugh Westlake becomes a widower and is left alone with his little daughter Dawn. He settled in a little town in eastern USA, opened a medical practice which wasn’t particularly successful and succeeds time after time in becoming involved in strange murder cases with elements of pure horror. He solves these with Dawn’s help, we are told by Jon...