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
Patrik Hedström
Gender: Male
He is employed as a detective inspector in Tanumshede, western Sweden, but spends most of his time in Fjällbacka, where he lives and – together with his wife, author Erica Falck – solves a row of murder cases in the books by Camilla Läckberg. Patrik Hedstrom is partly based on Läckberg’s first husband, and is described as a ‘completely ordinary guy’, but he is a skilled crime investigator with qui...