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

Singer Batts

Gender: Male

He is an extremely reluctant amateur detective of early middle-age, the owner of a little private hotel in Preston, Ohio, and has an energetic hotel manager in Joe Spinder. This means that Singer Batts decandicate himself to his hobby – he is a passionate bibliophile – and to studying Shakespeare. He is – according to author Thomas B. Dewey – tall and extremely thin because he doesn’t like eating...

Further reading