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

Simon Ark

Gender: Male

If you were to believe what he implies, he is a Coptic priest who is between 1,500 and 2,000 years old and who was condemned to forever wander the earth and battle against the devil. The tall, sun-tanned Simon Ark does this by solving a number of horror-like crime cases, many of them with an occult or religious background. The explanations in the short stories by Edward D. Hoch are, however,...

Further reading