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

Craig Kennedy

Gender: Male

Forensic expert, Craig Kennedy, is a professor of Chemistry at Columbia University in New York, but also works as a private detective and consultant for the police and others. Arthur B. Reeve has written a lot about his cases, but little about the man himself. Kennedy has clear-cut features and is unmarried. He shares a house with journalist Walter Jameson, who is the first-person narrator in...

Further reading