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.
Literary figure
Tom Maybridge
Gender: Male
English detective chief inspector, who is the main character in a series of novels by Barbara M. Gill. In the first, he is a somewhat anonymous but important figure in a police department, but already in the second book he is married to literary scholar Meg and – as in the third – the sole protagonist. Tom Maybridge is a patient investigator, he wears spectacles and his rather piercing gaze is a g...