A Catalogue of Crime

The book contains a total of 5,045 entries sorted, in each of the sections, in alphabetical order by the author's last name; where there is more than one entry for an author, each is in alphabetical order of the name of the work. Some entries are very short (one might say curt): one such—the only one for the author named—is:

1587 GRIFFIN, FRANK, Appointment with My Lady West 1946

A good opening chapter, after which everything goes to pieces. The narrator-hero always shouts and commits acts, including murder, without rhyme or reason.

The "West 1946" refers to the publisher, John Westhouse Publishers, and to the year of publication.

However, there are fifty-one entries for the prolific Agatha Christie. Christie wrote many other mystery stories, using several different detectives but Barzun and Taylor chose to review these only.

The first entry (no. 749) for her After the Funeral, published in 1953, says in part:

Not one of Agatha's best. The scheme is obvious and worked repetitiously.

The last entry (no. 799) for her Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, published in 1935, contains three sentences, one of which is:

The merit consists largely in Agatha's maintaining suspense about the small mystery of a name.

The other forty-nine entries for Christie are quite mixed. They range in praise (or lack thereof) from:

A Poirot story, and very dull... (entry no. 768, re Hickory, Dickory, Death, published in 1956) to:

A triumph of her art...of motive-building. That is where A.C. is unrivaled. She knows how to make plausible the divergence between action and motive that maintains uncertainty until the physical clues...mesh with motive to disclose the culprit. (entry no. 769 re The Hollow, published in 1946).

Part V The Literature of Sherlock Holmes... contains 81 entries (numbers 4965 through 5045). Included are, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, the originator of Holmes and the author of the 60 Holmes stories (56 short stories and four novelas). Also represented are a host of writers, some well-known from their works in other fields, and others little known to the general public but recognized by Sherlockian scholars as having made notable contributions to the Holmesian literature.

Among the former are Isaac Asimov, the renowned science-fiction writer; the Roman Catholic clergyman Ronald Knox; and Christopher Morley, a long-time writer for the Saturday Review of Literature and author of some 50 literary works, among the best known of which are Kitty Foyle and Parnassus on Wheels; and, of course, Jacques Barzun himself. In the latter category are Dorothy Sayers, the British crime novelist (whose Lord Peter Wimsey stories are the best known); Howard Haycraft, a U.S. publishing executive whose The Art of the Mystery Story (published in 1946) is a recognized survey of the mystery genre; and Edgar Smith, a General Motors corporate executive who was one of the U.S. founders of the Baker Street Irregulars, the first organized group in the United States dedicated to the formation of local groups of Holmes aficionados around the country (called "scion societies") for the purpose of meeting regularly for the scholarly study of the Holmes adventures and to participate in such activities of other scion societies, in the United States and around the world.