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

George Felse

Gender: Male

A central character in the Felse detective family, created by Ellis Peters (pseudonym for Edith Pargeter). George Felse is a hard-working and honest middle-aged police detective in the fictive town Comerford in Shropshire in England. But in many of the cases he solves, important (sometimes even major) roles are played by his wife – called Bunty and previously a famous concert singer – and his tee...

Further reading