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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

Max Van Larsen

Gender: Male

A depressed, middle-aged detective with a guilty conscience who works in the New York police section for missing persons. Max Van Larsen’s wife and 13-year-old son have died in a traffic accident, and he discovers that he has not known them well enough to be able to mourn them. He is, however, consoled when he meets the cheerful author Sylvia Plotkin, and together they solve the weird cases in t...

Further reading