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
Alix London
Gender: Female
Her world fell apart when her father, an internationally renowned art expert, was jailed for fraud. The young Alix recovered, trained as a curator and made herself a career in Seattle while she got back into contact with her father. She is now solving art crime with the help of him and the FBI in a series of novels by the husband and wife team Aaron and Charlotte Elkins.