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

Sarah Keate

Gender: Female

Young, intelligent nurse who works at a hospital as well as privately. She is careful and conscientious, and soon discovers that something is wrong – which it always is in the novels by Mignon G. Eberhart. Sarah Keate is a fairly good amateur detective, but to solve cases she is often assisted by the investigations carried out by police officer Lance O’Leary – but they don’t work together.

Further reading