Crime Writers

Photo: Sasha/Hulton Archive/Getty Images (1934)

Sample of authors

Tey, Josephine

Josephine Tey (the author of popular mystery novels) and Gordon Daviot (a well-known English playwright between 1933 and 1952) were one and the same: the pseudonyms of the reserved, at times even diffident, Scottish author Elizabeth Mackintosh. Little is known about her life; not even the year of her birth can be determined exactly. It was previously believed that she was born in 1897, but it...

Further reading

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 figures

Steven Mitchell

Gender: Male

He is a ‘typical’ Scotland Yard chief inspector: of average height, with an everyday and friendly countenance, and he likes to wear a mackintosh and a bowler hat. He is also a thorough investigator who appreciates work discipline and routine work. He cooperates with amateur detectives, but it is often Steven Mitchell who arrives at the correct solutions in the books that Josephine Bell has wri...

Further reading