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Portrait image of Colin Dexter Photo: Ulla Montan

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Dexter, Colin

The British crime writer Colin Dexter grew up in Stamford, Lincolnshire. After completing his military service in 1950, he read classics at Christ's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1953 and receiving an honorary masters degree in 1958. Dexter was a grammar school teacher until 1966, when he started to experience problems with his hearing. He then worked for the University of Oxford Examination...

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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.

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Literary figures

Wick (Wickham) Gore

Gender: Male

The British officer and big-game hunter Wickham Gore comes home after two years in Africa and finds himself involved in a suspected murder – which he solves so elegantly that he subsequently starts up his own detective agency. He is 40+, has a youthful, slim figure, slightly greying hair, a moustache and sparkling eyes. And he is the problem-solver in seven whodunnits by Lynn Brock (pseudonym f...

Further reading