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

Mumtaz Hakim

Gender: Female

Her family come from Bangladesh, but she has grown up in London. She became a widow at a young age when her husband – a brutal petty gangster – was murdered in a gang fight, and since then she has lived alone with her teenage step-daughter Shazia. Even though Mumtaz Hakim is a Muslim, and thus wears a veil, she is employed as an assistant by private detective Lee Arnold. The two together are the p...

Further reading