Whodunit?: A Who's Who in Crime & Mystery Writing

by Rosemary Herbert

Who populates the pages of crime and mystery writing? Who are the characters we willingly follow into the mystery genre's uneasy imaginative territory? And who created those characters in the first place? What life experience and expertise informs their work? What are the sources of their themes, regional accents, and even the axes that some grind? Why do some wish to give us a good laugh, while others seem hell-bent on making us shudder?

Whodunit? answers these questions and more. Here mystery expert Rosemary Herbert brings together enlightening and entertaining information on hundreds of classic and contemporary characters and authors. Some--such as P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Sherlock Holmes, and Kinsey Millhone--appear in individual entries. Still more keep company in articles about characters we admire, such as the Clerical Sleuth, and in pieces about those we love to hate, including the Femme Fatale and Con Artist. There is even an article on a figure that haunts so many great works of mystery--The Corpse.

Drawing on the Edgar Award-nominated volume The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing , Herbert adds 101 new entries on the hottest new names in works ranging from puzzling whodunits to chilling crime novels.

Genres: Nonfiction, Mystery

256 pages, Paperback

First published May 8, 2003

Reviews

[Jane Cairns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great reference book about authors of mysteries and their protagonists.

[Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 2003, so it's 20 years out of date. Besides books written since then, it omits many translations of Asian, Latin American, and European works that were written before 2003 but translated more recently. It also omits authors who were popular in the 1920s–1950s whose works were out of print in 2003 but have since been republished in Kindle editions or paperback.

Some entries, especially for short story authors, are uselessly vague. For instance, if you don't already know that Edward D. Hoch's series sleuths include a spy, a thief, a doctor, a cowboy, a Coptic priest, a police detective, a Romany king, Sherlock Holmes, and an intelligence agent for George Washington, among others, the entry in this encyclopedia won't tell you.

That's probably because Hoch's stories were collected since 2003. Same goes for other authors who published short stories in magazines but few if any novels. Their stories were hard to find in 2003, but they're available now because they've been collected or anthologized since then.

Again, this shows the need for updates, even just to include authors of stories written in the 20th century.

Finally, this guide doesn't include films and TV shows that are not adaptations. For them, the "Encyclopedia Mysteriosa" is a better source, but it only goes through 1994.

[Pippa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite out of date, as it was published in 2003. Still interesting though.