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
Matt Scudder
Gender: Male
He killed a young girl in an accident, which caused Matthew ‘Matt’ Scudder to leave his job with the police and his family. He started to drink and moved to the notorious ghetto Hell’s Kitchen in New York, but eventually became a ‘sober alcoholic’ and private detective without a licence in a suite of novels by Lawrence Block. Scudder even starts a long-term relationship with the prostitute Elaine...