Mysterious Mystery Reference

Gary Niebuhr's Make Mine a Mystery; A Reader's Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction published by Libraries Unlimited in 2003 has been garnering a bit of notice. It won the The Macavity Award for Best Bio/Critical Mystery Work from Mystery Readers International and The Anthony Award for Best Critical/Non-fiction Work for 2004. The Book is over 500 pages long and annotates approximately 2,700 titles in those pages, I would guess (Mr. Niebuhr owns 6,000 private eye novels and is responsible for these annotations apparently, though nowhere is this out and out stated, though we do learn that his parents who he thanks profusely, “allowed him access to our public libraries” and that his wife has lived in poverty for twenty years of their marriage to allow him to collect the aforesaid 6,000 novels and store them in their basement). All for the good I am sure, but we learn less about his standards for selecting the novels he annotates, only that he is “attempting to represent the entire mystery detective genre.” More on that later.
The book is notable for its $65.00 price tag and big print (well, it is for Libraries after all). Mr. Niebuhr on that: “Although this book is intended for professionals who advise readers, it will also be useful to fans of the genre; mystery bookstore owners, educators who teach literature courses…etc.” It would have been a lot more useful to most fans if it were smaller type, paperback and therefore less expensive? The most interesting and valuable thing about the book is its topology of private eye novels, mirrored in the structure of the book. Part 2 of the book is divided into three chapters, “Amateur Detectives,” “Public Detectives,” and “Private Detectives. Each of these is further subdivided and then that subdivision is discussed through the chronologically arranged annotations. Under Private Detectives for instance, we find: Private Detectives, Crime Specialist Detectives, Ex-Cop Detectives and Rogue Detectives. This all is quite good work, and fascinating to read, especially with the tripartite division of each category into “The Historical Founding Members,” “The Golden Agers and Beyond,” and “The Modern Practitioners.' Each author is subdivided by their character and the books in which that character figures are listed chronologically. All this is very well done, very nicely organized. The annotations are mostly short and clear and hint at the plot without giving anything away (“Jerry is publishing a true crime work by Amelia Gipson. When the author, while doing research, is poisoned from a drinking fountain at the New York Public Library, Pan takes a hand in the investigation.” reads the annotation for the Lockridge's Mr. and Mr. North novel Murder within Murder (though Niebuhr calls them Pamela North/Jerry North). The M&M North novels are preceded by a good statement about the whole series and various categorizations useful for the Reader's Advisor, or perhaps just the reader herself: Sot-boiled/Traditional, Humor, New York, New York, and Teams: for the North Series and Authors & Publishing for the particular Murder within Murder. I am going into all this just to show that the book is very well organized and in that sense well done, if non too exciting and certainly not eccentric in the style or sense of the annotations (presumably, or at least on the face of it, non-judgmental annotations). Since the book is so well organized, superficially non judgmental and “professional” it is therefore very surprising that the following authors appear to appear in this book: Nathan Aldyne, Michael Craft, Stan Cutler, Tony Fennelly, Katherine Forrest, Joseph Hansen, Ellen Hart, Steve Johnson, Val McDermid, Michael Nava, Lev Raphael, Richard Stevenson, John Morgan Wilson, R. D. Zimmerman, Mark Richard Zubro. 300 others, but none of these. Even the most casual reader of mysteries will guess what the common denominator for all of these novelist's is. Yikes! And not one included in this non-judgmental book. Perhaps there are no gay or lesbian readers in the library where Mr. Niebuhr works? Well, at least Jonathan Kellerman and Steven Saylor are included (each author has major and sympathetic gay characters in their series). One surely has to wonder what happened here, this couldn't be mere oversight, or accident? But what other purpose? Are there no editors at Libraries Unlimited, which is limited it appears in one sense.