Customer Reviews

The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If the mystery genre has lacked anything over the past century it's serious criticism. Aside from Jon L. Breen's reviews in Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine and Marilyn Stasio's pieces for the Times Book Review, mysteries have been virtually ignored by critics despite their permanent presence on bestseller lists. Bruce Murphy's The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery satisfies this need for insightful, intelligent commentary. Mr. Murphy provides a thorough analysis of mystery fiction from Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin to Bill Pronzini's nameless detective and even includes literary greats who have given the mystery a try-Jorge Louis Borges, William Faulkner, and Chester Himes to name a few. The mystery is also dealt with internationally through explorations of Manuel Vazquez Montalban, Paco Taibo, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Moreover, Mr. Murphy provides etymological histories of terms often encountered in the mystery novel and dispels common misconceptions readers have about the true purposes of agencies like INTERPOL. No subgenre is ignored: cozies, malice-domestics, psychological suspense, police procedurals, and the hard-boiled novel are all given equal attention. Brilliant, but forgotten crime writers like Charles Willeford, often ignored in other encyclopedias and bibliograpies, are finally given the respect they deserve. And cozy novelists Leo Bruce and Patricia Wentworth are rarely examined in the depth that they are here. Bruce Murphy's The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery is for every reader. Besides being comprehensive and informative, the book is just plain fun to read-a must for home libraries and coffee tables.

Yes, this book is biased, and in many cases my opinion differs from that of the author. (I love cozies and cat mysteries, for example.) Still, Mr. Murphy's writing style is most engaging, and I find that it's fun to mentally argue with him as I read. "The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing" is more comprehensive and objective than "The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery," but there is much to learn and enjoy here that is not in the Oxford book. I see the two books as complementary rather than as competing. If you are a mystery fan, and if you can possibly afford it, get both.

This 543-page compilation, The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery by Bruce Murphy, will likely appeal to mystery buffs, especially those interested in authors from past years.

Some entries are quite short, while others like Ellery Queen spanned two pages. Most entries are authors, but we also find classic titles like The Postman Always Rings Twice, Coffin for Dimitrios, Fer-De-Lance, The Big Clock, Murder on the Orient Express, and The Roman Hat Mystery.

My favorites were always present: Colin Dexter, P. D. James, G. K. Chesterton, Robert Van Gulik, Ellery Queen, John MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, Nicholas Blake, Cornell Woolrich, Dorothy Sayers, Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Arturo Perez-Reverte, and Dashiell Hammett.

Lesser known authors include Fergus Hume (The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, 1886), Maurice Leblanc (Arsene Lupin stories, early 1900s), R. Austin Freeman (Dr. Thorndyke stories, 1907- 1930s), Cyril Hare (Suicide Excepted, 1939), and Elliot Paul (The Mysterious Mickey Finn, 1939). I recall only two searches in which I was unsuccessful: R. T. Campbell (Bodies in a Bookshop, 1946) and H. F. Wood (The Passenger from Scotland Yard, 1888).

Many writers known in other literary genre at one time or another penned mystery stories. Examples include Mario Vargas Llosa, Charles Dickens, Honore De Balzac, Isaac Asimov, Henry James, Edgar Allen Poe, Ray Bradbury, Alexandre Dumas, Friedrich Durrenmatt, Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Twain, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

For those readers that not only enjoy reading books, but also reading about books and authors, The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery by Bruce Murphy would make a good gift.

Caution: The list price for The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery by Bruce Murphy is rather high, and the prudent buyer should look for substantial discounts. I paid a small fraction of the list price for a new hardbound copy (ISBN 0312215441). It is also available in soft cover (ISBN 031229414X).

Being a mystery fan, I like to know more than just the author's name or mystery's title before I dig in. This over-sized, informative book is more than I hoped for. I recommend it to all mystery fans, new and old. Each time you glance through it, you can't help but come away with something you didn't know before about the authors, their work, the mystery genre itself and what keeps it growing. Bruce F. Murphy has left no stone unturned; he has included everyone in the mystery field, not just the old classics or most popular.

I really enjoy the non-fiction books that give us inside revelation to the whodunit genre. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery is just that kind. It's more than a listing of authors and titles. Once you read the Preface explaining the triumph of the mystery story, you will enter into a book that lists mystery information in a dictionary/encyclopedia type style. You will find listings of authors, pseudonyms, titles, characters, poisons, mystery expressions, conventions, mystery awards, and more. It's great.

It's an informative guide of well over 500 pages and worth every penny. If the cost is too much for your pocket book, I recommend the book clubs that are offering it a little cheaper.

Most of us might anticipate an effort at objectivity in an encyclopedia. If those are your expectations, they would not be met by this work. In fact, the author appears to go out of his way to provide opinions where they might not normally be expected. For example, in the entry for Patricia Moyes, he comments, as if it is fact, that her main character Henry Tibbet "... falls into the tradition of Roderick Alleyn and Alan Grant, though he is less interesting... ". Whether Tibbett is more interesting or not clearly depends on each reader's outlook and, here, Mr. Murphy lets us know his.

The author's opinions here are quite interesting, although I would anticipate that most serious mystery readers will disagree with quite a few of them. Unfortunately, his bias seems to extend to excluding a number of popular and award winning authors, e.g., Steve Martini, Kate Wilhelm, whose work is even published by the same publisher, Earlene Fowler, etc.

In conclusion, this is a thick and extensive, albeit biased and exclusionary, work. Particularly, if supplemented by more inclusive mystery references this could make a useful addition to your library.

Finally the book I had been waiting for for years! I am a great fan of mystery writing but I often found myself stuck without new good authors to explore. How to choose among the millions of titles? How to know if I will like them? The jacket often doesn't say much, and the praise bits are usually only a series of meaningless adjectives. What I wanted was a book of reviews, a critical work that would give me a clear opinion on this and that writer and would recommend his or her best books. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery is exactly what I was looking for; for me it is the perfect mystery reader's companion. Before this encyclopedia all that was available were more or less comprehensive alphabetical lists of authors giving a short bio and maybe a rating, but nothing to make up your own mind, nothing to know what the author is really about, what his or her writing style is like, what are their preferred subjects and how they deal with them. Over the past few weeks I have read many of the pleasant short essays in the Encyclopedia and discovered several authors that I'm eager to know. I have also learned quite a few details about a number of specific novels that promise to be gripping. At least for a while, the specter of not having a mystery to read has been pushed away! I now have quite a reading list for the months to come, which also includes a mysterious writer from more than a century ago.... Thank you Mr.Murphy! Thank you for an opinionated book, there are too few of those around.

I also want to add a short note in reference to a customer review I read here and which, I must confess, pushed me to write my own. It is ridiculous to say that this book is sexist. I only wish that some people who pretend to defend women would realize how much harm they do to the female part of humanity by uttering statements that present women as ridiculous fools. What is the standing of someone who reads only women authors BECAUSE they are women, and independently from the quality of their writing? Women do not only read cozy mysteries--nor do they necessarily write them! (Of course, if this reviewer had read more and different books he/she would have probably realized that. If he/she had read THIS book, instead of one by an unknown Mr.Taylor, she/he would realize it too). I am even more outraged by the reviewer's dismissal of the quality of the authors selected by Mr. Murphy: is the reviewer aware that many of them are women writers and that among them are some of the most outstanding mystery authors? What does he/she think of Margaret Millar, or Josephine Tey, or the new writer Dorothy Porter! All of them are reviewed in the Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery and justly--I think--given a great review. I am a woman and I am deeply offended by the chauvinistic undertones of that message, to the point that I wondered if it was written with the purpose of discrediting women.

Once you open it, you can't put it down. Murphy knows his stuff. Well edited.

I really appreciated this book because it is far more than a mere listing of authors and titles.

Applause for Bruce Murphy's, Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery! At last we mystery fans have a critical guide to the best in a genre offering an ever burgeoning selection of titles. Murphy's literary judgment is sound and his style very readable. Contains lots of fascinating mystery information not available elsewhere. Great reading.

The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery is a great addition to any mystery readers collection. The book covers a wide variety of writers, stories, detectives, movies, and events regarding crime novels. It contains information about early novels and authors almost forgotten. Of course, no book of this type can cover all the bases, but the omissions are few. It is well written, but somewhat opinionated. The entries are fun to read; open to any page and browse to your hearts content. This book really is worth five stars.

This is a great book, full of interesting info and ideas. People who nitpick about the author's opinions miss the point--this is not a dry-as-dust reference book with lists of titles (though it does give you the stuff you expect out of an encyclopedia), but an engaging guide that will provoke you to think about what you like in a mystery and why. Instead of complaining that the author may be cool about your favorite author, be glad that he's giving you some credit for being intelligent, and inviting you into a conversation about writing. Not a lot of reference books do that!