The Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work, established in 1977, is a literary award presented as part of the Edgar Awards for a nonfiction critical or biographical hardcover, paperback, or electronic book.
To be eligible, biographical books should be "biographies of mystery writers or other notable practitioners of the genre, not to criminals."[1] Criminal biographies are eligible for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime.
The Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work winners are listed below.
| Author | Title | Result | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | , Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley | Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters | Winner | [2] | |
| 2009 | Dr. | Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to his Tell-Tale Stories | Winner | [3] |
| Author | Title | Result | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Winner | |||
| 2011 | Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History | Winner | ||
| Shortlist | ||||
| Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: 50 Years of Mysteries in the Making | Shortlist | |||
| and David A. Crowder | Sherlock Holmes for Dummies | Shortlist | ||
| and Hank Wagner (editors) | Thrillers: 100 Must Reads | Shortlist | ||
| 2012 | On Conan Doyle; or, The Whole Art of Storytelling | Winner | [4] [5] | |
| , Arne de Keijzer, and John-Henri Holmberg | Shortlist | |||
| Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making | Shortlist | |||
| Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film | Shortlist | |||
| and Walter Srebnick | Scripting Hitchcock: Psycho, The Birds and Marnie | Shortlist | ||
| 2013 | Winner | [6] | ||
| Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: The Hard-Boiled Detective Transformed | Shortlist | |||
| (editor) | Books To Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels | Shortlist | ||
| (editor) | In Pursuit of Spenser: Mystery Writers on Robert B. Parker and the Creation of an American Hero | Shortlist | ||
| 2014 | Winner | [7] [8] | ||
| Maigret, Simenon and France: Social Dimensions of the Novels and Stories | Shortlist | |||
| Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing | Shortlist | |||
| Ian Fleming | Shortlist | |||
| Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction | Shortlist | |||
| 2015 | Winner | [9] [10] | ||
| Shortlist | ||||
| James Ellroy: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction | Shortlist | |||
| Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: Classic Film Noir | Shortlist | |||
| Judges & Justice & Lawyers & Law: Exploring the Legal Dimensions of Fiction and Film | Shortlist | |||
| 2016 | Winner | [11] [12] | ||
| Shortlist | ||||
| and Tom Nolan | Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald | Shortlist | ||
| Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica | Shortlist | |||
| Shortlist | ||||
| 2017 | Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life | Winner | [13] | |
| Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life | Shortlist | |||
| Encyclopedia of Nordic Crime: Works and Authors of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden Since 1967 | Shortlist | |||
| Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula | Shortlist | |||
| 2018 | Chester B. Himes: A Biography | Winner | [14] | |
| From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men and Women who Created an Icon | Shortlist | |||
| Manderley Forever: A Biography of Daphne du Maurier | Shortlist | |||
| Murder in the Closet: Essays on Queer Clues in Crime Fiction Before Stonewall | Shortlist | |||
| Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes | Shortlist | |||
| 2019 | Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s | Winner | [15] | |
| Shortlist | ||||
| Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession | Shortlist | |||
| Mark X: Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father? | Shortlist | |||
| Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life | Shortlist |
| Author | Title | Result | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Hitchcock and the Censors | Winner | [16] [17] | |
| Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan | Shortlist | |||
| Shortlist | ||||
| Medieval Crime Fiction: A Critical Overview | Shortlist | |||
| Shortlist | ||||
| 2021 | Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock | Winner | [18] [19] | |
| Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club | Shortlist | |||
| Ian Rankin: A Companion to the Mystery & Fiction | Shortlist | |||
| and Brian Cliff | Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction | Shortlist | ||
| This Time Next Year We’ll be Laughing | Shortlist | |||
| 2022 | Winner | [20] | ||
| Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World | Shortlist | |||
| Shortlist | ||||
| Tony Hillerman: A Life | Shortlist | |||
| Shortlist | ||||
| 2023 | Winner | [21] | ||
| and J. C. Bernthal (editors) | Shortlist | |||
| Shortlist | ||||
| Shortlist | ||||
| Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman | Shortlist | |||
| 2024 | Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy | Winner | [22] | |
| Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder | Shortlist | [23] | ||
| and James L. Traylor | Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction | Shortlist | ||
| Shortlist | ||||
| Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe | Shortlist |