A good guide to crime fiction
The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction, edited by Nick Rennison, is always close at hand when I sit down to type (of course, so are lots of other books; my little office is a mess). It contains entries and book lists on 220 crime writers but, through clever features such as lists of crime novels on a given theme and a copious index, points the reader toward many more.The book packs an amazing amount of information into a compact space and is the closest thing to an indispensable reference that I have. (My one gripe is some unaccountable errors and misspellings in the Bill James entry that I hope the publishers will correct in subsequent printings and editions.)
© Peter Rozovsky 2006
Labels: reference
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 5:07 AM
3 Comments:
I love a good reference guide (of which there aren't many pertaining to crime fiction). I hadn't heard of this one, though. Is it only available in the UK?
I ordered my copy from the UK; I'm not sure if it's available here. It's a British publication, but it includes a generous selection of American writers.
I hope you are standing up well under the critical comments you received over you list of (male) detective novels. You're quite a fire-starter!
David: Here's another compact and handy book you might like: Murder Will Out -- The Detective in Fiction by T.J. Binion. It's a short, readable and remarkably comprehensive history of the detective in crime fiction. It punctures a few reputations, bolsters some little-known names, and may introduce you to some new writers.
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