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
Max (James) Maxted
Gender: Male
In 1919, he is a young war veteran and famed as a fighter pilot. He wants to start a school for pilots, but when his influential father dies in a strange accident, the handsome and charismatic James ‘Max’ Maxted is obliged to investigate the case – which he succeeds in doing. After which, author Robert Goddard lets him be a double agent in a couple of novels, in which he battles with the German ma...