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
Archie (Archibald) Cribb
Gender: Male
Usually he is just called Sergeant Cribb, and has several given names: he has been called Richard as well as Daniel, but according to author Peter Lovesey his real name is Archibald and he is called ‘Archie’. He is middle-aged and stubborn, and works for Scotland Yard in London in the days of Queen Victoria. By his side he has his patient ‘Watson’, detective constable Edward Thackeray.