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

William Tobin

Gender: Male

A police detective in New York with a university education – he graduated from Princetown in 1918 – and the main character in three novels by Dorothy B. Hughes. William ‘Toby’ Tobin is small of stature, with a thin face. Yet he acts with considerable poise, and he speaks so sharply that the words ‘fall like hailstones’. Little is known about his private life, but he smokes heavily and does not lik...

Further reading