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
Gerlof Davidsson
Gender: Male
He is a former sea captain, now more than 80 years old, and in need of a walking stick as well as a hearing aid in his daily life. But there is nothing wrong with his memory and deductive reasoning. Old Gerlof – loosely based on author Johan Theorin’s grandfather Ellert Gerlofsson – is the main character, if not always the real problem-solver, in four lauded detective stories set in an Öland islan...