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

Spenser

Gender: Male

Former state police officer who was sacked for disobeying orders, and who has instead set up his own business as a hard-boiled private detective in Chicago. Robert B. Parker has written a whole row of novels about Spenser, whose first name is never mentioned. He is very strong, violent and – in fact – interested in cooking. For many years he has had a relationship with school psychologist Susan Si...

Further reading