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
Simon (Si) Serrailler
Gender: Male
He is a police detective, later a chief inspector, in the fictive little cathedral town of Lafferton in southern England, where he also grew up. Simon Serrailler – Si to his family – has two twin sisters and a severely handicapped little sister. He is described by author Susan Hill as just over 35 years of age, blond and handsome, and although he is attractive to women he is single. In his free ti...