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

Johnny Métal

Gender: Male

Hardboiled crime reporter, based in New York, where he is also busy infiltrating organised crime. He usually acts more as a private detective than as a journalist. Métal is the main character in half a dozen detective stories packed with cliches and written by Frank Harding, a pseudonym of the French author Léo Malet, who was strongly inspired by Dashiell Hammett when he wrote the novels.

Further reading