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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 figure

Bernie Rhodenbarr

Gender: Male

Rhodenbarr is a clever burglar that operates in New York in a string of entertaining novels by Lawrence Block. Over the years, Bernard “Bernie” Rhodenbarr has had to solve a number of crimes, even murder, that he has not committed but that he risks being blamed for. His daytime job involves running a small second-hand bookshop that barely makes a profit, but he invested in it because he thought he...

Further reading