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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

Milena Proháska

Gender: Female

Her parents fled from Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the temperamental redhead Milena Proháska grew up in West Germany. She gained a qualification in Law and finally ended up in the security service Bundesnachrichtendienst. She has had a relationship with Detective Chief Inspector Jean Beringer, but that broke up, and according to author Doris Gercke, he then began to suspect that she was a ...

Further reading