Annal:2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Critical/Biographical Work

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Results of the Edgar Allan Poe Award® in the year 2008. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters

Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, Charles Foley

This remarkable annotated collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s previously unpublished private correspondence offers unique insight into one of the world’s most popular authors. For the first time, Conan Doyle emerges from the shadow of Sherlock Holmes, revealing a man whose character and exploits rival that of his famous creation. In particular, Conan Doyle’s correspondence with his mother exposes his endless search for fulfillment and success outside the Holmes stories.

 

Chester Gould: A Daughter's Biography of the Creator of Dick Tracy

Jean Gould O'Connell

In 1931, the Chicago Tribune introduced the public to an exciting new comic strip destined to become a classic: Dick Tracy. Tracy’s creator, Chester Gould, would spend the next 46 years of his life developing the dynamic, crime-fighting character, and his work on the strip won him the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in both 1959 and 1977.

A revolutionary in the comics industry, Gould invented both a genre and an icon. The personal story of this pioneer cartoonist is now presented in a biography written by Gould’s only child. Discussion of his ambitions, disappointments, popular accomplishments, and family moments comprise a thorough account of Chester Gould’s fascinating life. Appendices include commentary from his two grandchildren and a comprehensive list of his awards and distinctions, which included formal recognition from three American presidents.

 

A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational

Maurizio Ascari

A Counter-History of Crime Fiction takes a new look at the evolution of crime fiction, drawing on material from the Middle Ages up to the early Twentieth century, when the genre was theoretically defined as detective fiction. Considering ‘criminography’ as a system of inter-related, even incestuous, sub-genres, Maurizio Ascari explores the connections between modes of literature such as revenge tragedies and providential fictions, the gothic and the ghost story, urban mysteries and anarchist fiction, while taking into account the influence of pseudo-sciences such as mesmerism and criminal anthropology.

 

Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction

Christiana Gregoriou

This book directly explores the three aspects of deviance that contemporary American crime fiction manipulates: linguistic, social, and generic. Gregoriou conducts case studies into crime series by James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Patricia Cornwell, and investigates the way in which these novelists correspondingly challenge linguistic norms, the boundaries of acceptable social behavior, and the relevant generic conventions.

 

The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction

Patrick Anderson

There’s been a revolution in American popular fiction. The writers who dominated the bestseller lists a generation ago with blockbuster novels about movie stars and exotic foreign lands have been replaced by a new generation writing a new kind of bestseller, one that hooks readers with crime, suspense, and ever-increasing violence. Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post’s man on the thriller beat, calls this revolution “the triumph of the thriller,” and lists among its stars Thomas Harris, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Sue Grafton, and Elmore Leonard.

In his provocative, caustic, and often hilarious survey of today’s popular fiction, Anderson shows us who the best thriller writers are—and the worst. Most of all, Anderson demands that the best of these novelists be given their due—not as genre writers, but as some ofthe most talented men and women at work in American fiction. Don’t trust the literary elites to tell you what to read, he warns—make up you own minds.

 
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