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

Samuel Behrens

Gender: Male

Together with his colleague Daniel Calder, he forms one of the most lethal teams in British counter intelligence. Otherwise, he is an elderly, typically British gentleman, who busies himself with bee-keeping, plays chess and lives with an aunty in a little village in the county of Kent. Samuel Behrens is a linguistic expert, but like Calder is also a skilled car-driver and a clever detective,...

Further reading