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

Basil Willing

Gender: Male

Dr. Willing is the head of a psychiatric clinic in New York where he is often hired by, for example, the FBI to solve complex murder mysteries in thrillers and whodunits by Helen McCloy. Several are crime classics. Willing’s mother is Russian and his father American, and he has a man servant by the name of Juniper. After many years as a bachelor he eventually marries and Austrian woman, Gisela v...

Further reading