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
MacDougal Duff
Gender: Male
Mac Duff, as he is known by his friends, is a professor of History, based in New York and Michigan. Charlotte Armstrong wrote three whodunits about him early in her career. MacDougal Duff is tall and thin, with large knotty hands, and is rather abrupt in his manner and his speech. He doesn’t have much of a profile but he is an original amateur detective who solves murder mysteries by, for e...