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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.

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Literary figure

George Crowder

Gender: Male

He was a successful prosecutor and politician, but when George Crowder finds out that a man he had got sentenced to death was innocent, he fled from everything to live alone in the forests of Connecticut. He only sees his nephew, twelve-year-old Joey Trimble, who calls him Uncle George. But when necessary he nevertheless turns up and solves murder cases in books by Hugh Pentecost (pseudonym för ...

Further reading