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

Rinus de Gier

Gender: Male

He is a youthful and athletic police detective, a convinced bachelor despite the fact that he likes women and has many female ‘friends’. He comes from Rotterdam, but works in Amsterdam, where he partners his phlegmatic older colleague Henk Grijpstra in police novels by Janwillem van de Wetering. Rinus de Gier is a dreamer, very fond of cats, and an amateur musician – he often has a flute in his po...

Further reading