# 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." 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.

## Recipients
### 2000s

2000s Best Critical/Biographical Work winners :
| Year | Author | Title | Result | Ref. |
| 2008 | Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley | Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters | Winner | |
| 2009 | Dr. Harry Lee Poe | Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to his Tell-Tale Stories | Winner | |

### 2010s

2010s Best Critical/Biographical Work winners :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 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 |
| 2011 | Rafael Alvarez | The Wire: Truth Be Told | Shortlist |
| 2011 | John Curran | Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: 50 Years of Mysteries in the Making | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Stephen Doyle and David A. Crowder | Sherlock Holmes for Dummies | Shortlist |
| 2011 | David Morrell and Hank Wagner (editors) | Thrillers: 100 Must Reads | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Michael Dirda | On Conan Doyle; or, The Whole Art of Storytelling | Winner |
| 2012 | 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 |
| 2012 | John Curran | Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Philippa Gates | Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick | Scripting Hitchcock: Psycho, The Birds and Marnie | Shortlist |
| 2013 | James O'Brien | The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics | Winner |
| 2013 | John Paul Athanasourelis | Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: The Hard-Boiled Detective Transformed | Shortlist |
| 2013 | John Connolly (editor) | Books To Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels | Shortlist |
| 2013 | 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 |
| 2014 | Bill Alder | Maigret, Simenon and France: Social Dimensions of the Novels and Stories | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Justin Gifford | Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Andrew Lycett | Ian Fleming | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Melissa Schaub | Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction | Shortlist |
| 2015 | J. W. Ocker | Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe | Winner |
| 2015 | Charles Brownson | The Figure of the Detective: A Literary History and Analysis | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Jim Mancall | James Ellroy: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Robert Miklitsch | Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: Classic Film Noir | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Francis M. Nevins | Judges & Justice & Lawyers & Law: Exploring the Legal Dimensions of Fiction and Film | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Martin Edwards | The Golden Age of Murder | Winner |
| 2016 | Frederick Forsyth | The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan | Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Matthew Parker | Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Nathan Ward | The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Ruth Franklin | Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life | Winner |
| 2017 | Peter Ackroyd | Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Mitzi M. Brunsdale | Encyclopedia of Nordic Crime: Works and Authors of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden Since 1967 | Shortlist |
| 2017 | 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 |
| 2018 | Mattias Bostrom | From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men and Women who Created an Icon | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Tatiana de Rosnay | Manderley Forever: A Biography of Daphne du Maurier | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Curtis Evans | Murder in the Closet: Essays on Queer Clues in Crime Fiction Before Stonewall | Shortlist |
| 2018 | 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 |
| 2019 | Laird R. Blackwell | The Metaphysical Mysteries of G.K. Chesterton: A Critical Study of the Father Brown Stories and Other Detective Fiction | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Alice Bolin | Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Yasuhiro Takeuchi | Mark X: Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father? | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Laura Thompson | Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life | Shortlist |

### 2020s

2020s Best Critical/Biographical Work winners and shortlists :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 2020 | John Billheimer | Hitchcock and the Censors | Winner |
| 2020 | Ursula Buchan | Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan | Shortlist |
| 2020 | John Curran | The Hooded Gunman: An Illustrated History of Collins Crime Club | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Anne McKendry | Medieval Crime Fiction: A Critical Overview | Shortlist |
| 2020 | 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 |
| 2021 | Martin Edwards | Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Erin E. MacDonald | Ian Rankin: A Companion to the Mystery & Fiction | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Elizabeth Mannion and Brian Cliff | Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Jacqueline Winspear | This Time Next Year We’ll be Laughing | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Edward White | The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense | Winner |
| 2022 | Mark Aldridge | Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Richard Greene | The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene | Shortlist |
| 2022 | James McGrath Morris | Tony Hillerman: A Life | Shortlist |
| 2022 | 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 |
| 2023 | Mary Anna Evans and J. C. Bernthal (editors) | The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie | Shortlist |
| 2023 | David Geherin | The Crime World of Michael Connelly: A Study of His Works and Their Adaptations | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Andrew Neiderman | The Woman Beyond the Attic: The V.C. Andrews Story | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Lucy Worsley | Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Steven Powell | Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy | Winner |
| 2024 | David Bordwell | Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Max Allan Collins and James L. Traylor | Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Mark Dawidziak | A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Robert Morgan | Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe | Shortlist |