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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

Lee Ofsted

Gender: Female

Her parents only had a low income, and Lee Ofsted joined the army at an early age. She subsequently became a golf professional, with varied success. When a murder takes place during a golf tournament, she acts the amateur detective helping police officer Graham Sheldon – who later leaves the police force and becomes her lover. She has continued to solve murders in golf settings in books by Aaron a...

Further reading