Annal:2000 Anthony Award for Best Critical Work

From AwardAnnals

Results of the Anthony Award in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Detecting Women 3: A Readers Guide and Checklist for Mystery Series Written by Women

2000 Anthony-Critical winner
1999 Agatha–Nonfiction nominee
Score: 16.5

The new big book is better than ever. The most comprehensive guide available for detective fiction by contemporary women, including 690 authors with 225 new since the last edition. Expanded author profiles and easy-to-use indexes. Characters, settings, mystery types, book titles, publication dates, awards, author pseudonyms and more.

Ross Macdonald: A Biography

Tom Nolan

When he died in 1983, Ross Macdonald was the best-known and most highly regarded crime-fiction writer in America. Long considered the rightful successor to the mantles of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and his Lew Archer-novels were hailed by The New York Times as “the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.”

Now, in the first full-length biography of this extraordinary and influential writer, a much fuller picture emerges of a man to whom hiding things came as second nature. While it was no secret that Ross Macdonald was the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar—a Santa Barbara man married to another good mystery writer, Margaret Millar—his official biography was spare. Drawing on unrestricted access to the Kenneth and Margaret Millar Archives, on more than forty years of correspondence, and on hundreds of interviews with those who knew Millar well, author Tom Nolan has done a masterful job of filling in the blanks between the psychologically complex novels and the author’s life—both secret and overt.

Ross Macdonald came to crime-writing…

Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

Daniel Stashower

This fresh, compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship to his often stormy friendships with such figures as Harry Houdini and George Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle lived a life as gripping as one of his adventures. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Teller of Tales sets aside many myths and misconceptions to present a vivid portrait of the man behind the leg of Baker Street, with a particular emphasis on the Psychic Crusade that dominated his final years-the work that Conan Doyle himself felt to be “the most important thing in the world.