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
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...