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

Richard Thornhill

Gender: Male

An experienced police detective who works in the fictive town of Lydmouth in the middle of the last century. He is married to Edith and they have two children, but he is not really happy with either the town or the marriage. When Richard Thornhill meets journalist Jill Francis, they start a relationship, at the same time that they – each on their own, but sometimes together – investigate a ser...

Further reading