A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Reader's Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, and Related Genres

A Catalogue of Crime, by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, is a critique of crime fiction first published in 1971. A revised edition was published in 1989 by Barzun after the death of Taylor in 1985. The book was awarded a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1972.

In its preface Barzun says:

This book is for readers of crime fiction. By offering fact and opinion about authors and their works, from Voltaire's Zadig to the latest tale published at the time of our going to press (1988), it enables the connoisseur and the neophyte to find, with greater confidence than luck provides, stories good to read or good to avoid.

As to Taylor's collaboration in the work, Barzun explains:

(Taylor) had finished (prior to his death), I am happy to say, his half of the substantive work... Wendell Taylor is therefore as fully co-author of this edition as of the. Had he lived, it would have appeared much sooner.

The work contains 952 pages. It is divided as follows:

Part I Novels of Detection, Crime, Mystery, and Espionage (pages 1–566)

Part II Short Stories, Collections, Anthologies, Magazines, Pastiches, and Plays (pages 569-698)

Part III Studies and Histories of the Genre, Lives of Writers, and the Literature of Edwin Drood (pages 701-754)

Part IV True Crime: Trials, Narratives of Cases, Criminology and Police Science, Espionage and Cryptography (pages 757-858)

Part V The Literature of Sherlock Holmes : Studies and Annotations of the Tales, Nonfiction Parodies, and Critical Pastiches (pages 859-874)