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
Robert Macdonald
Gender: Male
Scotland Yard’s Robert Macdonald is of Scottish extraction but lives in London and solves cases in various parts of Great Britain in a long row of books by E.C.R. Lorac (pseudonym for Edith ‘Carol’ Rivett). He is of early middle-age, tall, trim and with an athletic build, with dark hair and grey eyes. He is also a bachelor and intends to remain so, and likes to go on long walks in the count...