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
Amelia Butterworth
Gender: Female
Araminta ”Amelia” Butterworth is a middle-aged, pleasantly curious and gregarious maiden assistant to the detective Ebenezer Gryce in a handful of stories by the American author A.K. Green. Miss Butterworth was a precursor and a source of inspiration for other woman spinster sleuths such as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.