The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives Book

A great recurring character in a series you love becomes an old friend. You learn about their strange quirks and their haunted pasts and root for them every time they face danger. But where do some of the most fascinating sleuths in the mystery and thriller world really come from? What was the real-life location that inspired Michael Connelly to make Harry Bosch a Vietnam vet tunnel rat? Why is Lee Child's Jack Reacher a drifter? How did a brief encounter in Botswana inspire Alexander McCall Smith to create Precious Ramotswe? In The Lineup, some of the top mystery writers in the world tell about the genesis of their most beloved characters---or, in some cases, let their creations do the talking.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

[Penzler] lined up some of the most famous mystery novelists around and asked them for 10-page riffs about their best-known characters. Those essays have been collected in The Lineup, an exciting omnibus volume that has widespread appeal and adds up to much, much more than the sum of its parts. The mystery writers were free to attack this assignment in whatever way they chose. Some were more assiduous than others. Some just rambled; some indulged their egos; some cooked up conversations with their fictitious creations…But each wound up delivering memorable revelations about the mystery genre and its different incarnations.