How the Index Works

Follow a link to an author. This will give you a page with an index of the author's works and a couple of sentences of biography. In cases where a particular detective appears in several books, these are grouped together.

Click on an individual book title to go to the detailed listing for that book. These listings look like this:

HANGMAN'S HOLIDAY
UK publication: 1933 (Victor Gollancz)
US publication: 1933 (Harcourt, Brace)
Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey, Montague Egg, others

Plot summary and comments: A collection of 12 short stories, four of them starring Peter Wimsey, six starring Montague Egg, and two others with no series character.

The boldface name at the top is the title of original publication, followed by the date and original publisher in the U.S. and U.K.-- usually these are different. If the book was also published under an alternate title, that is listed here as well. The "Detective" item lists the hero of the story (the person who solves the crime). In a collection of short stories there may be several of these. The plot summary, if there is one, tries not to give anything important away, but should let you know if, for example, you've read the story or not. I try to include names of other important characters, and eventually this may become searchable. If there is no plot summary, either I haven't read the book, or it is on the way. Some authors (currently including Josephine Tey, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers) are complete. Some items include my opinions on the book; take them for what they're worth.

Information Sources

I've used many sources of information about authors and books. For generating the initial lists of works, I have relied heavily on Allan J. Hubin's Crime Fiction II: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1749-1990 (New York: Garland, 1994), which can be found in many university libraries; it includes short story titles and film versions of stories. Other book details are taken from online library catalogs, particularly those of major universities, the Library of Congress, and the British Library.

Where I have used other reference sources for particular authors, these are mentioned on the author pages. Plot summaries are largely my own, with the exception of Agatha Christie's, for some of which I have adapted information from Charles Osborne's book, listed on her biography page.

The classic reference volume for mystery and detective fiction is Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor's A Catalogue of Crime (2nd ed., New York: Harper & Row, 1989), which gives capsule reviews of thousands of books in a very readable (and splendidly opinionated) style. For further online sources of information on and discussion about mystery novels in general, a good place to start is Michael Grost's Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection.

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