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

C.D. Sloan

Gender: Male

An esteemed Chief Inspector has many names – not least when it comes to Christopher Dennis Sloan in the books by Catherine Aird. For colleagues and the public (and readers) he is known as C.D., for relatives and friends as ‘Seedy’. He is of early middle age, works in the fictional county of West Calleshire in England, where he was also born, and is married to Margaret who – in the middle of a murd...

Further reading