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

Jimmie Haswell

Gender: Male

A jolly young criminal lawyer, working in London. He has a minor role in the English writer Herbert Adams’ first crime novel, The Secret of Bogey House, but subsequently solves tricky cases in more than half a dozen whodunits, and is then more active as a detective than as a lawyer. In his free time, Haswell plays golf and quietly flirts with young ladies until he finally marries one of them.

Further reading