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

Charlie Hood

Gender: Male

He is employed by the Los Angeles police, but has been lent out to the federal police and works for them in the border areas between the USA and Mexico in most of the books about him by T. Jefferson Parker. Charlie Hood is young, good-looking but with an everyday appearance, and lives alone. The great love of his life, the criminal Suzanne Jones, is killed already in the first novel. In his...

Further reading