The Heirs of Anthony Boucher Marvin Lachman

Al Hubin with his indispensible bibliography at
Bouchercon 2003.
Scholarship by Fans
detective fiction published
in English.” Later editions
updated it, and an edition
published in 2003, both
as a CD-ROM and in a
five-book set, carried it
through 2000. Since then,
Hubin uses his column in
Mystery*File to correct and
add information.
There are other bibliographies
that are enormously
useful and enjoyable
reading because they
are annotated. Breen was
a mystery reader from a
young age and a fan before,
in his twenties, he began
publishing fiction and other
material in EQMM. He
later became their reviewer.
In 1981 he published What
About Murder? A Guide to
Books About Mystery and Detective Fiction, covering 239 books, most of which were
published after 1967. This is a short book of 157 pages, but had Breen only included
works published before the “fan revolution,” it would have been far shorter. So extensive
is the later writing about the mystery, much of it by fans, that a second edition,
covering only 1981 through 1991, listed 565 books and took up 377 pages.
Detective and Mystery Fiction: An International Bibliography of Secondary Sources
(1985) by Walter Albert, a fan and a former Professor of French, goes beyond Breen
because he also includes thousands of magazine articles. There are evaluations of
many of the 5,200 entries but not in the depth Breen’s more limited scope allowed.
The first revision, published in 1997, included only the period 1985–1990 but now
had almost 7700 listings. A final revision, through the year 2000, on CD-ROM, has
10,715 annotated entries.
Other bibliographies were more specific. In 1992, Ellen Nehr published her Anthony-winning
Doubleday Crime Club Compendium 1 2 –1 1, a lavishly illustrated
history of the longest-lasting line of mysteries from any hardcover publisher. She
listed every book they published and described plots and even dust jackets.
There are also bibliographies of individual authors. In addition to working on one
for John D. MacDonald, June Moffatt, with the help of Francis M. Nevins, produced
a bibliography of the prolific Edward D. Hoch. She updates it each year. By 2004,
Hoch had published almost 900 short stories, as well as novels and non-fiction.
Nevins, with Ray Stanich, compiled The Sound of Detection about the Ellery
Queen radio mysteries. The first edition, in 1983, was useful but contained gaps.
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