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

Walter Purbright

Gender: Male

Detective inspector in the little fictive town of Flaxborough in England.He is a decidedly anonymous person without a family. Walter Purbright has an everyday appearance, but he is honest and a good police officer who in a dozen commended novels by Colin Watson with stoic calm deals with the very entertaining and sometimes absurd murder cases he investigates as well as his not particularly...

Further reading