Crime Writers

Photo: Anders Wiklund / TT

Sample of authors

James, P.D.

English crime writer born in Oxford as Phyllis Dorothy James. She graduated from the Cambridge High School for Girls in 1937. She served in the Red Cross during the war, and in 1941 she married Ernest Connor Bantry White. Although she dreamed of becoming a writer she helped her husband pass medical school while looking after the couple's daughters. After his return from the war, her husband...

Further reading

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 figures

Henry (Jackson)

Gender: Male

He is a police officer in New York – in about 3,000 years from now! He is also – as the main character in one of Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi detective stories – something of a portal figure for that sub-genre. Elijah Bailey, who can panic because of agoraphobia, lost his mother at an early age, and as a consequence is very caring of his own family, his wife Jezebel, called Jessie, and his son Bentley. A...

Further reading