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

Tad Anders

Gender: Male

A Polish soldier fled to England at the outbreak of the Second World War, married an English woman and had a son, Tadeusz ‘Tad’ Anders. Then he died in the war, and the boy is brought up by the mother. As an adult, Anders became a professional killer for the MI6 secret service until he retired and started to run a pub in a short suite of novels by Ted Allbeury. But his services are still needed…

Further reading