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

Charlie Muffin

Gender: Male

He was recruited by the British Intelligence Service already in the 1950s and since then has been a spy in a long suite of well-written, satirical novels by Brian Freemantle. But Charlie Muffin is no super-agent: he is shabby and looks so ordinary that nobody notices him. His bosses try to sacrifice him several times, and he is sometimes hunted just as eagerly by his own side as by the Russians.

Further reading