By offering fact and opinion about authors and their works, from Voltaire's Zadig to the latest tale published at the time of our going to press (1988), it enables the connoisseur and the neophyte to find, with greater confidence than luck provides, stories good to read or good to avoid.In the preface to the 1989 second edition of A Catalogue of Crime, Jacques Barzun credits the contributions of Wendell Hertig Taylor, who died in November 1985.

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.

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.

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.

Ross Macdonald's May 1971 review for The New York Times is headed, "A study of mystery and detective fiction—massive and limited":[4] We are given pages of descriptions of books by such respectable but pedestrian writers as John Rhode and Freeman Wills Crofts, while a brilliant innovator and master of construction like Eric Ambler is represented in the main descriptive text by two books.

Graham Greene, perhaps the most distinguished crime novelist of this century, is represented by a single early work, "A Gun for Sale," with the thumbs-down comment, "Suspense only."

[4]"While any ambitious bibliographical/critical work of this scope is bound to contain errors, A Catalogue of Crime has some true honkers," wrote Kevin Burton Smith, editor of The Thrilling Detective website.