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
Dave (David) Brandstetter
Gender: Male
He is the most famous homosexual problem-solver in crime fiction thanks to the twelve novels that Joseph Hansen wrote about him. ‘Dave’ Brandstetter is a middle-aged investigator for an insurance company in Los Angeles, later becoming a freelancer. He is tough and worn out, and is endlessly sad since his boyfriend died. As opposed to many other literary figures, he never gets any older in the boo...