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A Catalogue of Crime By Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor Harper, 831 pp., $18.95 Everyone’s doing it. Newsweek has run a cover story on the genre. The New York Times Book Review features full-length analyses by Ross MacDonald. The New Yorker and Harper’s devote lead reviews to mysteries (the opening paragraphs of the Harper’s review sounding oddly like the opening paragraphs of a recent NR mystery review).

Literary crime has always been big business. But now the genre, not really respectable since Poe and Conan Doyle, is being rediscovered. Graduate students have begun to write dissertations about it (let’s hope this won’t be the kiss of death) and now Professors Barzun and Taylor have given us this massive bibliography.

JR

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John R. Coyne Jr.

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A Catalogue of Crime By Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor Harper, 831 pp., $18.95 Everyone’s doing it. Newsweek has run a cover story on the genre. The New York Times Book Review features full-length analyses by Ross MacDonald. The New Yorker and Harper’s devote lead reviews to mysteries (the opening paragraphs of the Harper’s review sounding oddly like the opening paragraphs of a recent NR mystery review).

Literary crime has always been big business. But now the genre, not really respectable since Poe and Conan Doyle, is being rediscovered. Graduate students have begun to write dissertations about it (let’s hope this won’t be the kiss of death) and now Professors Barzun and Taylor have given us this massive bibliography.