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

Nate Heller

Gender: Male

His father was a police officer and Nathan ‘Nate’ Heller was one too. But he allowed himself to be corrupted, and instead became a successful private detective in the gangster-infected Chicago of the 1930s. He is of early middle age, morally rather lax, but he has a pleasant attitude and socialises with some of the city’s (real!) artists and criminals in a series of stories by Max Allan Collins.

Further reading