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
Bingo (Robert Emmett) Riggs
Gender: Male
Talkative, spindly small criminal, with a pointed face and mouse-coloured hair, who dreams of becoming rich – if necessary by illegal means. Robert Emmett ‘Bingo’ Riggs is a slovenly street photographer who travels around the USA in a suite of crime novels by Craig Rice (pseudonym for Georgiana Randolph Craig) with his colleague ‘Handsome’ Kusak. Time after time they are obliged to act as detectiv...