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

Peter Duluth

Gender: Male

When his wife, Magdalena, dies in a fire, he starts drinking, becomes an alcoholic and ends up in a mental hospital. There, the young blond theatre agent Peter Duluth meets actress Iris Pattison, who is being treated for a depression. They get married after a while, and solve a number of murder cases, often in theatre settings, which have been described by Patrick Quentin (pseudonym for Richard...

Further reading