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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

John Silence

Gender: Male

Algernon Blackwood wrote only six short stories about John Silence, ‘physician extraordinary’, but the mysterious, rich doctor with unnatural psychic powers is nevertheless a classic as the ‘occult detective’. Inspired by Sherlock Holmes, he uses logical reasoning to expose ‘magical’ criminal deceptions, but uses his psychic ability to solve mysteries – the result is horror fiction with a detectiv...

Further reading