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

Hugh Curtis

Gender: Male

Young, ambitious, newly-employed journalist on the London newspaper The Record. He is charming and has good looks, but nevertheless has problems in his job – especially when he must compete against Mollie Bourne, a beautiful, red-haired star reporter on the competitor The Courier. But they get on well, sometimes cooperating, and create headlines by solving murder cases in three books by Paul S...

Further reading