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.

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Literary figure

Blotto (Devereux) Lyminster

Gender: Male

The honourable Devereux Lyminster, better known as ‘Blotto’, comes from a respected noble family. He is well-built, strong and handsome, a famous cricketer and has a brain like a hen. When it comes to solving murder cases in a series of farcical crime novels by Simon Brett, which are set in the 1920s, he thus often plays the role of a stupid ‘Watson’ to his beautiful, smart sister Honoria, called...

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