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Portrait image of Alexander McCall Smith Photo: Ola Erikson / Forflex 82010)

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McCall Smith, Alexander

The British author Alexander McCall Smith – called Sandy by family and friends – was born in Bulawayo in the then British colony of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) as the youngest of four children to a British public prosecutor and his wife. He was schooled at the Christian Brothers College in Bulawayo before travelling to Scotland in 1966 to start studying Law at the University of Edi...

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Portrait image of Émile Gaboriau

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Gaboriau, Émile

While Edgar Allan Poe, the American author of short stories, is generally considered to be the father of modern crime fiction, Émile Gaboriau has been cited as the father of the crime novel. He was the first to use at least four defining elements of the genre: 1) He wrote briefly and succinctly compared to his contemporaries and his novels are driven by the crime plot. 2) His protagonists are ...

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