Every entry is annotated, and a succinct critical judgment given. The Catalogue lists more than 5,000 novel-length mysteries, collections of detective stories, true-crime books, and assorted volumes celebrating the delights of detection. Barzun and Taylor definitely prefer classic whodunits, especially those written with wit, panache, and, above all, cleverness.

All these books are dog-eared and marked up, with loosened bindings booksellers sometimes facetiously describe their condition as “much loved.” My own copy of A Catalogue of Crime certainly fits that description, even though I generally disagree with many of its harsh judgments on modern crime fiction. Bleiler’s Guide to Supernatural Fiction and Martin Seymour-Smith’s New Guide to Modern World Literature. I keep it by my bedside, along with a handful of similarly wide-ranging and often idiosyncratic reference books, such as E. But I’ve always thought that A Catalogue of Crime, written with his lifelong friend Wendell Hertig Taylor, could be his most lasting masterpiece. I want to tell you that if ever at any time someone stands in your way or has done you harm, here is my card, just call me, and he will be taken care of.’”īarzun then added, “I have strewn the byways with my victims.”īarzun’s best-known books include Berlioz and the Romantic Century, Teacher in America, A Stroll with William James, and Simple and Direct, a guide to writing. At the end of the first semester, he came to me and said: ‘I am a Turk, and I want to express my gratitude because in your dealing with the Turkish question you have been perfectly fair. In one of his first history classes, Barzun recalled, there “was a beautifully dressed man of about forty, with very black hair and a signet ring with a diamond and a tie pin he was done up to the nines. Murray relates a particularly delightful story about young Professor Barzun.

This past year Michael Murray brought out Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind, tracking his subject’s astonishing life from a French boyhood in which Barzun played marbles with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire through a brilliant career at Columbia University, first as an undergraduate, then as a teacher, and finally as the university’s provost. Certainly up through his 90s, he had remained active as a scholar and writer, even producing a surprise best seller From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, in 2000, when he was 92. For a while there, it seemed that Barzun-rhymes approximately with “parson”-might go on forever, adding to our knowledge of the past, assailing the decline of standards, both exemplifying and fighting for cultured, civilized values. Last week, the distinguished cultural historian, teacher, and man of letters Jacques Barzun died at the age of 104.

Simple and Direct by Jacques Barzun