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
Michal Exner
Gender: Male
A young, handsome, always elegantly dressed detective captain with the Prague Police, he has a Ph.D in law, drives a Mercedes and has a comfortable bachelor pad to which he often invites his subordinates to drink coffee. Michal Exner has a sense of humour, appreciates beautiful women and good food: incidentally, he is a good cook himself. He is also the main character in just over a dozen crime...