A Catalogue of Crime
First edition (1971)
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| Author |
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|---|---|
| Cover artist | Cloud Studio |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Crime fiction criticism |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Harper & Row |
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Publication date
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1971 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 831 pages |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 164806 |
A Catalogue of Crime is a critique of crime fiction by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, first published in 1971. The book was awarded a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1972. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1989.
This book is for readers of crime fiction. By offering fact and opinion about authors and their works, from Voltaire's Zadig to the latest tale published at the time of our going to press (1988), it enables the connoisseur and the neophyte to find, with greater confidence than luck provides, stories good to read or good to avoid.
In the preface to the 1989 second edition of A Catalogue of Crime, Jacques Barzun credits the contributions of Wendell Hertig Taylor, who died in November 1985. "He had finished, I am happy to say, his half of the substantive work [and] is therefore as fully co-author of this edition as of the first. Had he lived, it would have appeared much sooner."
The work contains 952 pages. It is divided as follows:
The book contains a total of 5,045 entries sorted, in each of the sections, in alphabetical order by the author's last name; where there is more than one entry for an author, each is in alphabetical order of the name of the work. Some entries are very short (one might say curt): one such—the only one for the author named—is:
1587 GRIFFIN, FRANK, Appointment with My Lady West 1946
A good opening chapter, after which everything goes to pieces. The narrator-hero always shouts and commits acts, including murder, without rhyme or reason.
The "West 1946" refers to the publisher, John Westhouse Publishers, and to the year of publication.
However, there are fifty-one entries for the prolific Agatha Christie. Christie wrote many other mystery stories, using several different detectives but Barzun and Taylor chose to review these only.
The first entry (no. 749) for her After the Funeral, published in 1953, says in part:
Not one of Agatha's best. The scheme is obvious and worked repetitiously.
The last entry (no. 799) for her Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, published in 1935, contains three sentences, one of which is:
The merit consists largely in Agatha's maintaining suspense about the small mystery of a name.
The other forty-nine entries for Christie are quite mixed. They range in praise (or lack thereof) from:
...
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