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.
Literary figure
Leonard Pine
Gender: Male
Afro-American, physically fit, homosexual Vietnam veteran with an explosive temper. Leonard Pine grew up in the home of an uncle who disapproved of him because of his sexual orientation. He is good friends with his total opposite, the calm, pacifistic Hap Collins with roots in the American working class, and they work together for a detective agency in a long suite of stories filled with...