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
Anna Travis
Gender: Female
When readers get to meet police daughter Anna Travis for the first time, she has just become a police detective in London. She makes a rapid career together with her colleague James Langton. She is a young, competent woman with red hair and brown eyes, and likes to dress in a manner that could be seen as ‘somewhat risqué’ with low-cut necklines and short skirts. Since she went horseback riding a l...