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
Kate Burrows
Gender: Female
Skilled and hard-skinned police detective in Grantley, Yorkshire. Kate Burrows is respected by her colleagues, but has problems when she falls in love with gangster Patrick Kelly and they move in together. She is pretty, with brown hair, brown eyes and a slim body with long legs. Author Martina Cole lets her grow old in the books: in the last one, she has retired but is still used by her former...