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
Kek Huuygens
Gender: Male
During the Second World War, he fought in the resistance movement in the Netherlands, but now the broad-shouldered man is, according to author Robert L. Fish, the world’s foremost smuggler. Kek Huuygens – born Polish, but with a genuine American passport and an acquired Dutch name – is dark and handsome with cold, grey eyes, and a bachelor since his former wife betrayed him for another man and a l...