Listed: 100 American Crime Writers (2012), edited by Steven Powell

Here's a brand new reference book in Palgrave Macmillan's Crime Files series: 100 American Crime Writers. I hope to be able to review it in the future, but it's extremely expensive: $85 on Amazon.com (Gad! And you thought my book was dear!).

On Amazon I looked at excepts from the book, which had fourteen contributors. Naturally I was curious to see which authors made the cut, so to speak. And naturally I was especially interested in authors of classical Golden Age detective fiction.

Here they are (all these authors were alive and publishing in the Golden Age, c. 1920-1939, even though Arthur B. Reeve, for example, is considered more pre-GA):

100 crime writers
in under 400 pages

John Dickson Carr
Mignon Eberhart
Erle Stanley Gardner
C. Daly King
Ellery Queen
Arthur B. Reeve
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Rex Stout
S. S. Van Dine
Carolyn Wells

Conveniently, they number to ten (William Faulkner shows up too, though his contribution to genuine mystery/crime genre writing is slight relative to his overall body of work). There are about the same number of hard-boiled/noir writers from the same period (no George Harmon Coxe though).

So what do you think? Would these be your choices, were you limited to ten?

Exclusively pre-Golden Age, by the way, we have Jacques Futrelle (d. 1912) and Edgar Allan Poe (d. 1849). Among more recent writers I was glad to see our crime fiction power couples Margaret Millar and Ross Macdonald and Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini.

I also was pleased, incidentally, to see how many of these writers I have written about on this blog: