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

Ben Safford

Gender: Male

For an American congressman, Benton ‘Ben’ Safford (Democrat) is an unusually vague and everyday sort of man. He comes from little Newburg in Ohio, doesn’t have a family of his own but still has some relatives back in Ohio – primarily his determined sister Janet. But when the need arrives, he is a clever amateur detective, which is shown in seven novels by R.B. Dominic (pseudonym for Mary J. Latsis...

Further reading