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

Montague Egg

Gender: Male

A travelling salesman for a wine importer in England, and the main character in almost a dozen short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers. The round-cheeked, red-faced and stable Montague Egg is a bachelor, always on the move, always very friendly and with the gift of the gab, and he wears a trilby. But he is also a skilled amateur detective, not least thanks to The Salesman’s Handbook which he often c...

Further reading