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

Penny (Pennington) Wise

Gender: Male

The young and rather self-assured Pennington ‘Penny’ Wise is an artist, as well as a famous – at any rate in the books by Carolyn Wells – ‘psychic’ detective. It means that he solves cases that seem to be inexplicable, and often have supposedly ‘supernatural’ elements. Which do, of course, in the end transpire to have completely natural explanations. His assistant is the teenage film actress Zizi.

Further reading