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Author and illustrator Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise) announced the end of his newest multi-year saga; Rachel Rising on Twitter Yesterday. The series about a girl who is raised from the dead is coming to a close at issue #42. Moore teased that an upcoming seventh trade paperback is being released — he also hinted […]

By Rosemary Herbert

Canonize or confine to the dustbin of literary history? How do the editors decide?

Well may readers wonder how scholars decide which story/author to canonize and which to confine to the dustbin of literary history. This was an issue I dealt with in several books for Oxford University Press, including The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, for which I served as editor in chief, and the anthologies that I edited with the late Tony Hillerman, The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories and A New Omnibus of Crime. With the Companion, I had the privilege of drawing on the expertise of sixteen advisory editors. But final judgment on which stories to include in our two anthologies fell to just Tony and me. Fortunately, in Tony, I had a great resource and support in making decisions that we both took quite seriously, even while we indulged in some good laughs along the way.

Tony Hillerman is well known to readers as the author of numerous novels about Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Navajo Tribal Policemen who solved crimes at the cultural crossroads of the American Southwest. He won numerous awards for his fiction. But while his skills as an editor are less recognized, they deserve to be celebrated, too. Take it from one who edited two anthologies with him: Tony Hillerman knew his genre. He also possessed a wonderful playfulness and sense of humor.

Both of the anthologies that Tony and I edited were designed to represent developments in the literary history of crime writing. In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, our goal was to illustrate the rise of detective fiction in the United States from earliest times to the close of the twentieth century. In our next book, A New Omnibus of Crime, our mission was to bring together stories representing seventy-five years of genre innovations that have occurred since Sayers published her landmark anthology, The Omnibus of Crime.

We knew it was a tall order to follow in Sayers’ footsteps, so we decided to tread carefully. We pulled together reams of short stories and, over a period of months, we pored over them earnestly in our own homes.

We were looking for stories that took steps forward from the fiction of Sayers’ day. We wanted to demonstrate how mystery writers over the last three quarters of a century allowed the love element — which had been largely shunned in Sayers’ time as a distraction from the mystery plot — to enter and enrich their stories. We sought to showcase the growth of the regional crime story by selecting some distinctly regional writings. We decided to show how some contemporary crime writers dare to leave the stain of crime on the scene instead of tidying up as thoroughly as did Sayers’ contemporaries. And of course we wanted to make sure a variety of sleuths and crime types would be found in A New Omnibus of Crime. We found stories that feature private eyes and policeman, nosey neighbors and accidental sleuths, murder in the mean streets and plots cooked up over Christmas pudding. We were just as ready to be original in our choices as we were to carefully consider stories that already stood tall in the landscape of crime and mystery writing.

Finally, we got together in Tony’s home just outside of Al