Customer Reviews

Detecting Men: A Reader's Guide and Checklist for Mystery Series Written by Men

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OK, you know the drill: I love this book, it was a great read, it brought my family closer together, blah, blah, blah. Seriously folks, this book is different. This book could save your LIFE.

I work in a bookstore, and in my line of work, I never can tell who the next person through the door will be. I stand behind the counter, and I don't know whether the next customer carries the bullet with my name on it. But I do know this: every customer comes armed with a question. For all I know, some lunatic may bust in, size me up for lead fillings, and shout, "Freeze, punk! What was the eighth Nero Wolfe novel, who's character is Doc Ford, and what book do I have to buy to get James Grady's short story, Kiss the Sky?"

Now, if I were unprepared, I'd be worm food, but because I have Detecting Men, I can shout back, "Over My Dead Body, Randy Wayne White, and Unusual Suspects!" as I dive for cover. Mollified with info, he heads back to his basement apartment. I live to fight another day.

Detecting Men. Because the life you save may be your own.

No, this is not a sequel to "The Rules." "Detecting Men" is a gorgeously produced, well-edited and probably comprehensive catalog of over 600 men who have written mystery series.

Take note of all those qualifiers, because the format is slightly different from Heising's companion volume, "Detecting Women 3." While that reference (a third edition, hence the "3") covers all living female writers and a good portion of those who have since died, space limitations forced "Detecting Men" to limit itself. So, while Anna Katherine Green (who wrote mysteries back in the 1880s) and Agatha Christie are in "DW3" you won't find Ellery Queen and Rex Stout in "DM." Even under those restrictions, "Detecting Men" still offers nearly 450 pages of information, compared with 384 pages in the other book.

So what do you get for your money? A paragraph on each author accompanied by a checklist of each series book, with notations for those which were nominated or winners of writing awards like the Edgar, Anthony and Shamus.

While that section is fascinating in itself for the minutae about the authors, the second half of "DM" contains charts, charts and more charts that can help the series reader locate all kinds of information. Readers of police procedurals will find four pages listing authors, when they wrote, the character's name and profession and setting. Looking for mysteries involving journalists? "DM" lists 25, from Dick Belsky' reporter Lucy Shannon to Collin Wilcox' Stephen Drake (a newspaper reporter with ESP). There's 14 small-town sleuths, two surburban detectives, 15 gay and lesbian detectives and 14 disabled detectives. Detectives are also listed by first name, settings, the year they appeared, and by title. The latter category appeals to the trivia buff in me; not surprisingly, there are a long list of titles beginning with dead, death, and murder, but I didn't expect 31 beginning with "gently." Sounds like the ideal niche for a book collector.

The pseudonym section can help straighten out who wrote want, as well as help find a favorite author's other works. P.C. Doherty, for example, has published books under his own name as well as under Michael Clynes, Ann Dukthas, C.L. Grace and Paul Harding and, possibly, Anna Apostolou. Best-selling author Jack Higgins ("The Eagle Has Landed") has also written as Martin Fallon, James Grapham and Hugh Marlowe. This section may prove disappointing to those who learn that Lydia Adamson's light-hearted animal mysteries was, in fact, written by Frank King.

No, this book is not a Vegematic. Call it the Cuisinart of crime. Ms. Heising takes her well-researched author bios, book chronologies, award info and handy cross-references, blends them together and produces this tasty concoction of P.I.s, M.O.s and FYIs. Great book!

Outstanding reference for all mystery fans as a companion to Heising's award winning Detecting Women 2. Makes Mystery reading even more enjoyable.

Did anyone else notice that she left out two major writers from her book?
John D. MacDonald: author of the Travis McGee series, along with many other mystery - thriller novels and short stories. In the awards section, she does acknowledge that MacDonald won an Edgar in 1972, but there is no mention of him in the index?
Same thing for Ross MacDonald: Harper, "The Drowning Pool" and many other successful novels, an Edgar in 1974, but again, no mention anywhere in her book?
Seriously, how could these two giants of the genre get left out of this book? I bought the thing on a whim, it was pretty cheap used, and it seems well organized and fun to use, but after I noticed these two giant glaring omissions, I feel like giving it to Goodwill.