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
Emily Pollifax
Gender: Female
Elderly American widow, 60+, bored with tea parties and charity work, who applies for a job as a ‘secret agent’ with the CIA. She is allowed to try and manages it so well that she gets a permanent job and becomes the main character in a suite of novels by Dorothy Gilman. Mrs Emily Pollifax is quick-witted, articulate and has a brown belt in karate. She eventually marries the patient Cyrus Reed.