Why read The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing?

Book cover of The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing

Book description

This companion is a one-volume, alphabetically arranged encyclopedia exploring the full range of literature suggested by the title. The 672 articles range from brief factual pieces to longer synthetic treatments of topics of central thematic interest.

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Martin Edwards

Author

I dreamed for many years of writing a book about crime fiction. I’m primarily a crime novelist, but so was Julian Symons, and the experience of writing fiction is invaluable when discussing other writers and understanding what they were trying to do. I approached Oxford University Press, with a view to producing a Companion about the genre, comprising essays by writers including myself. This led to a fruitful meeting with an OUP editor and novelist, Michael Cox, but the project was stillborn when his American colleagues had commissioned just such a book, to be edited by Rosemary Herbert. Rosemary invited…

From Martin's list on crime fiction, the world’s most popular genre.