Jon L. Breen - What About Murder? A Guide to Books About Mystery and Detective Fiction

What About Murder? A Guide to Books About Mystery and Detective Fiction — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "What About Murder? A Guide to Books About Mystery and Detective Fiction" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...77

---

title	:	What About Murder? : A Guide to Books About Mystery and Detective Fiction
author	:	Breen, Jon L.
publisher	:	Scarecrow Press
isbn10 | asin	:	0810814137
print isbn13	:	9780810814134
ebook isbn13	:	9780585071671
language	:	English
subject	Detective and mystery stories--History and criticism--Bibliography, Detective and mystery stories--Technique--Bibliography.
publication date	:	1981
lcc	:	Z5917.D5B73eb
ddc	:	016.823/0872
subject	:	Detective and mystery stories--History and criticism--Bibliography, Detective and mystery stories--Technique--Bibliography.

Page i What About Murder? A Guide to Books About Mystery and Detective Fiction by Jon L. Breen The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Metuchen, N.J., & London 1981

Page ii Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Breen, Jon L., 1943 What about murder? Includes index. 1. Detective and mystery stories History and criticism Bibliography. 2. Detective and mystery stories Technique Bibliography. I. Title. Z5917.D5B73 [PN3448.D4] 016.823'0872 81-645 ISBN 0-8108-1413-7 AACR2 Copyright 1981 by Jon L. Breen Manufactured in the United States of America

Page iii For Rita ... who knows where the bodies are buried.

Page v Table of Contents Foreword (by Ellery Queen) vii Introduction ix Acknowledgments xvii I. General Histories 3 II. Reference Books 11 III. Special Subjects 31 IV. Collected Essays and Reviews 47 V. Technical Manuals 64 VI. Coffee- Table Books 74 VII. Works on Individual Authors 82 Addendum 135 Index 139

Page vii Foreword Dear Reader: Sometime in 1940, D. Appleton-Century Company mailed us the galley proofs of Howard Haycraft's Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. We read the book with so much pleasure that we sent the following comment to the publisher: "We were so completely fascinated by Mr. Haycraft's Murder for Pleasure that we read clear through the book in one sitting. It is a landmark in the history of detective fiction a brilliant, necessary, long-overdue study, written with charm and authority." In the forty years since, only a few nonfiction books dealing with the mystery genre have evoked a similar response in me. But now I can write almost the same testimonial for Mr. Breen's book. "I became so fascinated by Mr. Breen's title that once I started reading it, I put aside my own urgent deadlines. It is a landmark in the field of books about mysteries a brilliant, necessary, long-overdue reference work, written with charm and authority." After all these years, more than fifty, as a player in "the grandest game in the world" (John Dickson Carr's phrase), I still find the roll call of names of authors, titles, detectives, critics, historians, biographers, bibliographers, publishers, collectors, fans, and aficionados I still hear their sounds as a musical and mystical incantation. If your heart belongs to mysteries, the magical names in this book will cast their spell over you too. ELLERY QUEEN

Page ix Introduction: What About Murder? After a boyhood in which Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, Hearthstone of the Death Squad, Mr. Chameleon, the Hardy Boys, the cinematic Charlie Chan, and Djuna (of the Ellery Queen, Jr., books) loomed uncommonly large, I became a reader and collector of adult detective fiction in 1956. In that year, I bought my first issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, read a novel called The Frightened Stiff, by Kelley Roos, and headed resolutely down a path of crime from which there has been no turning back. Almost immediately, I decided that reading mysteries was not enough. I wanted to read about mysteries their history and technique, the lives of their authors. And I wanted to compare my opinions with those of other readers. It didn't take long to learn what was available in the way of writing about mystery and detective fiction, because there wasn't much. I combed old issues of EQMM for the extensive and informative introductions to individual stories. I learned that Howard Haycraft (whose "Speaking of Crime" column in EQMM of the forties was a prime source of news and opinion, albeit a few years old) had written the definitive history of the form in Murder for Pleasure, and I managed to find a copy of that. I learned that Anthony Boucher of the New York Times and James Sandoe of the Herald-Tribune were the best reviewers going, and I eagerly sought their columns. Book Review Digest proved a reliable source for locating mystery reviews. (Alas, it isn't any more.) Certain older titles of criticism and history, like H. Douglas Thomson's Masters of Mystery, proved difficult to track down, though I finally did. I learned that some of the best surveys of de-

Next page

1234567...77

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «What About Murder? A Guide to Books About Mystery and Detective Fiction»

Look at similar books to What About Murder? A Guide to Books About Mystery and Detective Fiction. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Lourens Trit

Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 6, April 16, 1938

Harlan Ellison

Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

Richard Deming

The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories

P. James

Talking About Detective Fiction

Elizabeth Mannion

Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction

Whicher Jonathan

The suspicions of Mr. Whicher: a shocking murder and the undoing of a great Victorian detective

Footner

Madame Storeys Way

Bill Pronzini

Gun in Cheek : An Affectionate Guide to the Worst in Mystery Fiction

Stephen F. Soitos

The blues detective: a study of African American detective fiction

Peter Lovesey

Last Detective

Richard J. Bleiler

Reference Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction:

Gary Warren Niebuhr

Make Mine a Mystery: A Readers Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction (Genreflecting Advisory Series)

Discussion, reviews of the book What About Murder? A Guide to Books About Mystery and Detective Fiction and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.