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
Þóra Guðmundsdóttir
Gender: Female
When we meet her in Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s first crime novel, skilful lawyer Þóra Guðmundsdóttir is 36 years old and the single mother of a son Gylfi, 16, and a daughter Sóley. She is divorced from her husband Hannes, but later embarks upon a relationship with the German police officer Matthew Reich. He is blond with long hair, high cheek bones and walnut-shaped blue eyes. And he is also the part-o...