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

Lorraine Page

Gender: Female

Police officer in Los Angeles who breaks down when a colleague is killed. Lorraine Page starts to drink, is dismissed from the force, her husband leaves her, she loses custody of her daughters and becomes homeless. After having been involved in the hunt for a serial murderer, she does, however, manage to make her way back, stops drinking and becomes a successful private detective. According to...

Further reading