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

Timothy Trant

Gender: Male

Police detective in New York, well educated and always snobbishly dressed in tailored suits. Timothy ‘Tim’ Trant is stubborn, sometimes unscrupulous, when he carries out his murder investigations, and is in the habit of putting pressure on a suspect when he is actually gathering evidence against another. The books are written by Q. Patrick and Patrick Quentin, pseudonyms for Richard Webb and/or Hu...

Further reading