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

Violet Strange

Gender: Female

Miss Strange is a beautiful, lively, young American woman with a rich father, and who is interested in literature. She has an active social life, but on the quiet is an amateur detective who solves criminal cases she has heard about. The short stories about her by A.K. Green are rather puerile, and Strange behaves like a teenager, but she has been acknowledged as one of the first girl detectives...

Further reading