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.

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Literary figure

Tony Mendez

Gender: Male

Newly graduated from an FBI school, the young Tony Mendez is employed as sheriff in the little town of Oak Knoll in California. He has a number of murder cases to solve, and he makes enthusiastic use of the modern investigative methods he has learnt. The job is harder than Tony Mendez thought, but luckily he is given some help by a former teacher, Vince Leone, and Vince’s wife, lawyer Anne, in t...

Further reading