Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work

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.^[1]

The Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work winners are listed below.

Recipients

2000s

2000s Best Critical/Biographical Work winners^[2]

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
2008	Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley	Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters	Winner	[3]
2009	Dr. Harry Lee Poe	Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to his Tell-Tale Stories	Winner	[4]

2010s

2010s Best Critical/Biographical Work winners^[2]

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
2010	Otto Penzler	The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives	Winner
2011	Yunte Huang	Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History	Winner
	Rafael Alvarez	The Wire: Truth Be Told	Shortlist
	John Curran	Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: 50 Years of Mysteries in the Making	Shortlist
	Stephen Doyle and David A. Crowder	Sherlock Holmes for Dummies	Shortlist
	David Morrell and Hank Wagner (editors)	Thrillers: 100 Must Reads	Shortlist
2012	Michael Dirda	On Conan Doyle; or, The Whole Art of Storytelling	Winner	[5][6]
	Dan Burstein, Arne de Keijzer, and John-Henri Holmberg	The Tattooed Girl: The Enigma of Stieg Larsson and the Secrets Behind the Most Compelling Thrillers of our Time	Shortlist	[6]
	John Curran	Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making	Shortlist	[6]
	Philippa Gates	Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film	Shortlist	[6]
	Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick	Scripting Hitchcock: Psycho, The Birds and Marnie	Shortlist	[6]
2013	James O'Brien	The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics	Winner	[7]
	John Paul Athanasourelis	Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: The Hard-Boiled Detective Transformed	Shortlist
	John Connolly (editor)	Books To Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels	Shortlist
	Otto Penzler (editor)	In Pursuit of Spenser: Mystery Writers on Robert B. Parker and the Creation of an American Hero	Shortlist
2014	Erik Dussere	America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture	Winner	[8][9]
	Bill Alder	Maigret, Simenon and France: Social Dimensions of the Novels and Stories	Shortlist	[9]
	Justin Gifford	Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing	Shortlist	[9]
	Andrew Lycett	Ian Fleming	Shortlist	[9]
	Melissa Schaub	Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction	Shortlist	[9]
2015	J. W. Ocker	Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe	Winner	[10][11]
	Charles Brownson	The Figure of the Detective: A Literary History and Analysis	Shortlist	[10]
	Jim Mancall	James Ellroy: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction	Shortlist	[10]
	Robert Miklitsch	Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: Classic Film Noir	Shortlist	[10]
	Francis M. Nevins	Judges & Justice & Lawyers & Law: Exploring the Legal Dimensions of Fiction and Film	Shortlist	[10]
2016	Martin Edwards	The Golden Age of Murder	Winner	[12][13]
	Frederick Forsyth	The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue	Shortlist
	Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan	Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald	Shortlist
	Matthew Parker	Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica	Shortlist
	Nathan Ward	The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett	Shortlist
2017	Ruth Franklin	Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life	Winner	[14]
	Peter Ackroyd	Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life	Shortlist
	Mitzi M. Brunsdale	Encyclopedia of Nordic Crime: Works and Authors of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden Since 1967	Shortlist
	David J. Skal	Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula	Shortlist
2018	Lawrence P. Jackson	Chester B. Himes: A Biography	Winner	[15]
	Mattias Bostrom	From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men and Women who Created an Icon	Shortlist
	Tatiana de Rosnay	Manderley Forever: A Biography of Daphne du Maurier	Shortlist
	Curtis Evans	Murder in the Closet: Essays on Queer Clues in Crime Fiction Before Stonewall	Shortlist
	Michael Sims	Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes	Shortlist
2019	Leslie S. Klinger	Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s	Winner	[16]
	Laird R. Blackwell	The Metaphysical Mysteries of G.K. Chesterton: A Critical Study of the Father Brown Stories and Other Detective Fiction	Shortlist
	Alice Bolin	Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession	Shortlist
	Yasuhiro Takeuchi	Mark X: Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father?	Shortlist
	Laura Thompson	Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life	Shortlist

2020s

2020s Best Critical/Biographical Work winners and shortlists^[2]

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
2020	John Billheimer	Hitchcock and the Censors	Winner	[17][18]
	Ursula Buchan	Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan	Shortlist
	John Curran	The Hooded Gunman: An Illustrated History of Collins Crime Club	Shortlist
	Anne McKendry	Medieval Crime Fiction: A Critical Overview	Shortlist
	Mo Moulton	The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women	Shortlist
2021	Christina Lane	Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock	Winner	[19][20]
	Martin Edwards	Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club	Shortlist	[20]
	Erin E. MacDonald	Ian Rankin: A Companion to the Mystery & Fiction	Shortlist	[20]
	Elizabeth Mannion and Brian Cliff	Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction	Shortlist	[20]
	Jacqueline Winspear	This Time Next Year We’ll be Laughing	Shortlist	[20]
2022	Edward White	The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense	Winner	[21]
	Mark Aldridge	Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World	Shortlist
	Richard Greene	The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene	Shortlist
	James McGrath Morris	Tony Hillerman: A Life	Shortlist
	John Tresch	The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science	Shortlist
2023	Martin Edwards	The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators	Winner	[22]
	Mary Anna Evans and J. C. Bernthal (editors)	The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie	Shortlist
	David Geherin	The Crime World of Michael Connelly: A Study of His Works and Their Adaptations	Shortlist
	Andrew Neiderman	The Woman Beyond the Attic: The V.C. Andrews Story	Shortlist
	Lucy Worsley	Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman	Shortlist
2024	Steven Powell	Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy	Winner	[23][24]
	David Bordwell	Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder	Shortlist	[24]
	Max Allan Collins and James L. Traylor	Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction	Shortlist	[24]
	Mark Dawidziak	A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe	Shortlist	[24]
	Robert Morgan	Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe	Shortlist	[24]