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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.

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Literary figure

Mac (Cyril) McCorkle

Gender: Male

After the Second World War, during which he was an officer in a special force in Burma, Cyril ‘Mac’ McCorkle uses his savings to buy a bar in Bonn. Unfortunately, he agrees to let Mike Padillo buy a share of the business, and Padillo is (albeit unwillingly) a spy and executioner for an American secret service. Which leads to McCorkle being caught up in a number of dramatic events in books by Ros...

Further reading