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.
Literary figure
John Poole
Gender: Male
When Henry Wade (pseudonym for Henry Aubrey-Fletcher) introduced the pipe-smoking police detective John Poole in 1934, he was a new type of police officer in crime fiction: well brought-up, charming, with an academic education and from a good family. He is just over 180cm tall, athletically built, with a firm mouth and grey eyes. He becomes a police officer when he is only 23 years old, and a...