The Chronicles of Solar Pons

Detective fiction is a sub-genre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator , either professional or amateur, investigates a... crime, often murder. Some scholars have suggested that some ancient and religious texts bear similarities to what would later be called detective fiction. In the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders , the story told by two witnesses breaks down when Daniel cross-examines them. In the play Oedipus Rex by Ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, the title character discovers the truth about his origins after questioning various witnesses. The earliest known example of a detective story was The Three Apples, one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the One Thousand and One Nights . In this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy locked chest along the Tigris river and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who then has the chest broken open only to find inside it the dead body of a young woman who was cut into pieces.
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A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer... works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because of the fragmentation of the medium into genres. Since the short story format includes a wide range of genres and styles, the actual length is determined by the individual author's preference and the submission guidelines relevant to the story's actual market. Guidelines vary greatly among publishers. Many short story writers define their work through a combination of creative, personal expression, and artistic integrity. They attempt to resist categorization by genre as well as definition by numbers, finding such approaches limiting and counter-intuitive to artistic form and reasoning. As a result, definitions of the short story based on length splinter even more when the writing process is taken into consideration.
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