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Portrait image of Robert van Gulik Robert van Gulik with wife Shui Shih-fang 1946

Författarporträtt

Gulik, Robert van

Robert Hans van Gulik was born in Zutphen, the Netherlands, and grew up in Batavia (now Jakarta) in the former Dutch East Indies, where his father served as a medical officer in the Dutch Army. Van Gulik’s father collected Chinese porcelain and passed his interest on to his son who taught himself Mandarin. Robert van Gulik was fascinated by Chinese history and culture, and he became an authority o...

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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.

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Literary figure

Jude Nichols

Gender: Female

She is usually just called Jude: she rarely mentions her surname, and she says even less about her background. She is blonde and plump, and has gone through a whole row of lovers. Jude Nichols is also bohemian, noisy, full of vitality and works professionally as a healer using alternative methods in the village of Fethering. Together with her prim neighbour, Carole Seddon, she solves murder...

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