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

Carole Seddon

Gender: Female

In Simon Brett’s jolly books about the little village of Fethering in Sussex in England, we meet the quiet, sensible, former civil servant Carole Seddon. She is 50+, an everyday type of appearance, has grey hair, is retired and divorced from her husband David. She wants to live a quiet and peaceful life, but she becomes friends with her exuberant bohemian neighbour Jude Nichols and – much to her o...

Further reading