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

Joe Ryker

Gender: Male

A worn-out but effective police detective in New York, accustomed to violence and for that reason always armed with two revolvers. He is a disillusioned lone wolf and the main character in a suite of novels by Jack Cannon (pseudonym for Nelson DeMille). Disagreement about rights, however, meant that for a while several authors wrote books about Joe Ryker – and DeMille was forced to re-name his h...

Further reading