Annotation

This short-lived monthly was one of the earliest to feature crime as a genre, using a format not uncommon in Victorian magazines such as The Strand, publisher of the Sherlock Holmes stories, centred on crime fiction, satire and ‘interesting facts’ from around the world. Most of its crime stories were probably translated from English middlebrow fiction, with one prominent narrative pattern being to have a first-person narrator unveil the crime scene.

Xin xiaoshuo cong also featured historical fiction and several articles by Khoo Seok Wan (1874-1941), later a prominent cultural figure in Singapore.