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

Pepe Carvalho

Gender: Male

Spain’s most famous private detective is Pepe Carvalho, a many-sided as well as a contradictory personality – he has, for example, been a CIA agent as well as an imprisoned communist. He is interested in food and literature, and solves cases in a row of books by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, in which the home city of both of them, Barcelona, is given a lot of room. Carvalho is often accompanied by his...

Further reading