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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

Evan Tanner

Gender: Male

Tanner is an agent working for a service that is so secret that not even the CIA knows about it, they take him for a Soviet spy. When he first appears in a novel by Lawrence Block, Tanner has not slept for the past ten years due to having sustained a severe brain injury in the Korean War. He is cryogenically frozen in 1970, thawed up in 1997 and continues to pursue his career as a tough, smart...

Further reading