The Crown Crime Companion

Fully annotated and reviewed by Otto Penzler, this list will provide grist for discussion and will be a welcome reminder to fans about top books they may have missed. Each list is introduced with an essay by a master of that category, including such top writers as Joseph Wambaugh, Sue Grafton, and Scott Turow. Includes a list of Edgar Award winners.

Three librarians from Scottsdale, Arizona provide library staff with an introduction to the mystery genre and offer tips and techniques for providing advice to mystery readers in the library. They include some of their own bibliographies, but refer readers elsewhere for fuller ones. They also include a brief history of the genre to pass on to readers new to it.

This book provides an introduction to 24 iconic figures, real and fictional, that have shaped the detective/mystery genre of popular literature. Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection: From Sleuths to Superheroes is an insightful look at one of our most popular and diverse fictional genres, providing a guided tour of mystery and crime writing by focusing on two dozen of the field's most enduring creations and creators. Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection spans the history of the detective story with series of critical entries on the field's most evocative names, from the originator of the form, Edgar Allan Poe, to its first popular running character, Sherlock Holmes; from the Golden Age of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Charlie Chan—in fiction and films—to small screen heroes, such as Columbo and Jessica Fletcher. Also included are other accomplished practitioners of the craft of mystery/crime storytelling, including Agatha Christie, Tony Hillerman, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Including advice from bestselling writers, this is a complete guide to writing crime novels, from research and planning to getting published.

Watching the screen version of a classic mystery novel can be disappointing. By necessity or artistic license (or possibly just ego) changes are often made by the filmmakers--many of them ineffective or even detrimental. This book focuses on the screen adaptations of 65 famous mysteries and examines how the filmmakers either succeeded or failed in the telling of the story. Interviews with several famous mystery writers are included, with their comments on how filmmakers treated their work.

This invaluable resource provides information about and sources for researching 50 of the top crime genre writers, including websites and other online resources. Crime Writers: A Research Guide is an easy-to-use launch pad for learning more about crime fiction authors, including those who write traditional mystery novels, suspense novels, and thrillers with crime elements. Emphasizing the best and most popular writers, the book covers approximately 50 contemporary authors, plus a few classics like Agatha Christie. Each entry provides a brief quotation that gives some indication of writing style; a biographical sketch; lists of major works and awards; and research sources, including websites, biographies, criticism, and research guides. There are also read-alikes for selected authors. Of special note is the inclusion of websites and other online resources, such as blogs and social networking sites, which are often overlooked in author-reference sources. The book also provides an overview of the genre and subgenres, a timeline, and a comprehensive bibliography. An ideal resource for genre studies and literature classes, this guide will also be invaluable to readers' advisors, book club leaders, students, and genre fans.

In this remarkable book, Martha Hailey DuBose has given those multitudes of readers who love the mystery novel an indispensable addition to their libraries. Unlike other works on the subject, Women of Mystery is not merely a directory of the novelists and their publications with a few biographical details. DuBose combines extensive research into the lives of significant women mystery writers from Anna Katherine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart with critical essays on their work, anecdotes, contemporary reviews and opinions and some of the women's own comments. She takes us through the Golden Age of the British women mystery writers, Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Allingham and Tey, to the leading crime novelists of today, focused on the women who have become legends of the genre. And though she laments, "so many mysteries, so little time," she makes a good effort a mentioning "some of the best of the rest." When DuBose writes of the lives of her principal players, she relates them to their times, their families, their personal situations and above all to their books. She subtly points out that Sayers, whose experience with the men in her life was inevitably disastrous, created in Lord Peter the ideal lover -- one who is all that a woman desires and needs. DuBose gives us the curriculum vitae that Dorothy Sayers created to help her bring Peter Wimsey to a virtual actuality. Ngaio Marsh would give up an active presence in the theatrical world she loved, but she recreated it for herself as well as her readers in many of her novels. The biographies of these woman are as engrossing as the stories they wrote, and Martha DuBose has shined a different, intimate and intriguing light on them, their works, and the lives that informed those works. This book is so full of treasure it's hard to see how any mystery enthusiast will be able to do without it. And what a gift it would make for anyone on your list who has been heard to announce "I love a mystery." Some of the treats inside: In the Beginning: The Mothers of Detection Anna Katherine Green Mary Roberts Rinehart A Golden Era: The Genteel Puzzlers Agatha Christie Dorothy L. Sayers Ngaio Marsh Margery Allingham Josephine Tey Modern Motives: Mysteries of the Murderous Mind Patricia Highsmith P.D. James Ruth Rendell Mary Higgins Clark Sue Grafton and more!!

This book is an appreciation of selected authors who make extensive use of humor in English detective/crime fiction. Works using humor as an amelioration of the serious have their heyday in the Golden Age of crime writing but they belong also to a long tradition. There is an identifiable lineage of humorous writing in crime fiction that ranges from mild wit to outright farce, burlesque, even slapstick. A mix of entertainment with instruction is a tradition in English letters. English crime fiction writers of the era circa 1913 to 1940 were raised in the mainstream literary tradition but turned their skills to detective fiction. And they are the humorists of the genre. This book is not an exhaustive study but an introduction into the best produced by the most capable and enjoyable authors. What the humorists seek is to surprise the reader by overturning their expectations using a repertoire of stylistic conceits and motifs (recurring incidents, devices, references). Humor has a liberating effect but is concerned too with "comic contrast" through ugliness and caricature. In crime fiction one effect is intellectual pleasure at solving (or attempting to solve) a puzzle. Another is entertainment but with serious undertones.