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 Jericho
Gender: Male
He is a well-built, strong man who is instantly recognisable thanks to his impressive red beard, and he is often likened to a Viking. But the Korea veteran John Jericho is a successful and well-paid – albeit seen as somewhat controversial – artist in Greenwich Village who because of his sense of justice and his curiosity solves crimes in a suite of novels and (primarily) short stories by Hugh Pen...