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.

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Literary figure

Den navnløse

Gender: Male

A Danish journalist and private detective, whose name is never actually mentioned in the 13 books about him that Dan Turèll has written. The Nameless is an ordinary, rather worn-out gentleman who lives on his own in a boring flat and comes across crimes in shabby settings, inhabited by odd people. He solves cases with the help of Superintendent Ehlers – and the beautiful lawyer Gitte Bristol, wh...

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