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

Henk Grijpstra

Gender: Male

Grijpstra is a middle-aged detective in Amsterdam who has teamed up with detective Rinus de Gier in a string of police novels by Janwillem van de Wetering. Grijpstra hails from Friesland. He is an unhappily married man who wanted to become a jazz musician or artist as a young man. He consoles himself by playing a set of drums that mysteriously appeared at the police headquarters one day.

Further reading