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

Merci Rayborn

Gender: Female

Female police detective, based in Orange County in California and featured in a trilogy by T. Jefferson Parker. Merci Rayborn is young, attractive, stubborn and devoted to her work – but is dogged by misfortune. Already in the first book, she makes a mistake which leads to the death of an older colleague – and he is the father of her as-yet-unborn son. As a single mother, she solves crimes where h...

Further reading