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

Emma Graham

Gender: Female

She is only twelve years old, but she already works as a waitress in her mother’s old and now rather shabby hotel in the countryside near La Porte in Maryland, and also as a youth reporter for a little local newspaper. But above all, the sharp and humorous – but also very manipulative – Emma Graham is interested in criminal cases, usually old ones. And she solves them in four detective stories for...

Further reading