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

Sharon McCone

Gender: Female

She grew up in an area with social problems in the city of San Diego, but after some difficult teenage years she took a hold of her life, studied at university, became engaged in politics and eventually became a detective in a cooperative of lawyers. Author Marcia Muller describes Sharon McCone as dark and attractive, but also tough and stubborn – and she is regarded as the first hard-boiled f...

Further reading