Trawling old books and pamphlets, Thomas McDade, a retired F.B.I. agent, created “The Annals of Murder,” a definitive bibliography of early American crime writing. Courtesy Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

It might have been antimony in the lemonade, laudanum in the coffee, morphine in the whiskey, or strychnine in the sugar bowl. Arsenic could be dusted over oysters, spread onto a bread-and-butter sandwich, stirred into beer, brandy, or cider, even steeped in chamomile tea. Poison was everywhere in early America, and poisoners could buy it anywhere. They told the grocer that they needed to rid their cupboards of mice, the druggist that they wanted something to quiet the bark of a stray dog, or the hardware-store clerk that they required something for killing minks. “The usual arsenic for the usual rats,” Thomas McDade observed of the murder, in 1815, of Ann Becker, by her husband, Barent, in Mayfield, New York—“this time served with stewed cranberries.”

McDade wasn’t a murderer, but he was interested in murder, and not just poisonings. When someone in America had been murdered, and anyone else had written about it, then McDade read the results, and took notes. One by one, Mrs. Becker’s arsenic-laced cranberries and hundreds of other historical homicides found their way into the squeaky green filing cabinet that he kept in his den. McDade became the Casaubon of crime literature, and the University of Oklahoma Press published his key to all murderologies in 1961, under the title “The Annals of Murder: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on American Murders from Colonial Times to 1900.”

An inventory of more than two hundred years of homicide, the book is a literal whodunit, not a whytheydunit and barely a whattheydun. Pardon-seeking confessions, moralizing execution sermons, self-justifying stories crafted by law enforcement, tell-alls seeking pardons for the accused, salacious trial transcripts revised and revisited by printers across multiple editions: McDade read everything having to do with murder in America, and he made what remains one of the most comprehensive bibliographies in the field. More than a reading list, “The Annals of Murder” is a remarkable look at America’s long obsession with true crime: an eleven-hundred-and-twenty-six-round game of Clue, with a rotating roster of weapons and settings, murders and victims, verdicts and executions.

“As far as I can tell,” McDade writes in the introduction to his bibliography, “the first murder in New England was committed in 1630 with a gun.” Following that firearm were instruments of death as delicate as handkerchiefs and as practical as pump handles. The first homicide by bomb he could find was in 1854, when a former resident of an asylum mailed its superintendent an explosive device that killed the man and his wife. There were strangulations by horsewhip and clothesline, bludgeonings by garden hoe and tomahawk, and drownings of various kinds, but mostly murder in America was accomplished with knives, axes, and guns. Means mattered little to McDade, though, and motive mattered even less. “The importance of motive in murder is vastly overrated,” he reflects. “What would move one person to kill another might cause a second only to laugh.”

What interested him were murders that inspired a pamphlet or book since those texts “constitute a great storehouse of legal, political, economic, social, and local history.” He went looking for such publications in private collections and rare bookstores, and especially in libraries: the Henry E. Huntington Library and Museum, in California; the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C.; the Wichita City Public Library; the Boston Athenaeum; the American Antiquarian Society, in Massachusetts; the Princeton Theological Library; the New York Public Library; the New York Historical Society; the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; and law schools across the country.

For every publication, McDade made a citation that included the title of the work, its publishing imprint, copyright date, pagination, and illustrations and typographical features, with notes on bindings and a list of editions. To go along with those, he crafted, with cruel clarity, brief explanations of who did what and when. These often consist of a single, savage sentence; they are never more than a paragraph or two. “The not unusual case of one seaman stabbing another,” one reads, in its entirety. Another tells the whole story in fourteen words: “When his wife was found in a well, Graham was lynched by a mob.” Every so often, there’s the tiniest bit of editorializing. For one case, involving insurance fraud, McDade begins the entry: “Getting away with murder is difficult enough, and trying to make money from the deed substantially reduces the chances of success.”

McDade, who was born in Brooklyn, sharpened his wit far from the stacks: he wasn’t a librarian or academic but a retired F.B.I. agent. A lawman with literary interests, he kept a hip-pocket diary during the years that he worked for J. Edgar Hoover, dodging Baby Face Nelson’s bullets on a highway in Illinois and avoiding Ma Barker’s one-eyed, three-legged alligator, Ole Joe, in Florida. He then edited “The Grapevine,” an alumni magazine of sorts, published by the Society of Former Special Agents of the F.B.I. After his time with the Bureau, McDade joined the Army, serving in the Pacific before coming home to New York, where he became an executive at General Foods Corporation.

Murder, though, was always his sideline. He called his house Scotland Yard, was involved with the Baker Street Irregulars and the Mystery Writers of America, and convened his own supper club, which was known (with a nod to Thomas De Quincey) as the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder. In 1980, along with the writer P. D. James, a former C.I.A. chief, an expert on Jack the Ripper, and the founder of the bookstore Murder Ink, McDade was one of the distinguished guests on the Sagafjord when it sailed from Florida to Italy on the First Floating Whodunit Cruise.

By then, McDade’s bibliography was well known by collectors and well loved by librarians. In a remembrance following McDade’s death, in 1996, the bookseller and publisher Patterson Smith wrote that “The Annals of Murder” “might fairly be said to be one of the finest genre bibliographies in American book collecting.” Smith, who had attended the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder, remembered McDade “as a devoted lover of books, an assiduous researcher, a conscientious guardian of the truth, an accomplished writer, and a man most generous to all who sought his help.” That included not only crime writers whose errors McDade corrected and researchers whose work he aided but also prisoners in the Westchester County Jail, to whom he offered free legal aid during his retirement. It’s Smith who best conveys the extent to which McDade’s work became the standard index of early American crime literature, describing how “not in McDade” is a rarity, generally a misunderstanding of McDade’s criteria for inclusion, only occasionally the result of newly discovered publications.

The publications that McDade himself depended on followed standard formulas. They almost always featured grisly cover and title-page illustrations framed by bold fonts proclaiming bold titles about the crime of the century, the horridness of some homicide, the fiendishness of some fiend, the full particulars of some particularly awful assassination, the only copy of some confession, or the freshly uncovered correspondence of some killer. Six coffins on a cover were better than one, and title pages with gallows, preferably occupied, were best. When Mrs. Bessie Brown was murdered by Mr. William Brown, in 1874, the account of the crime appeared under the heading “A startling confession showing the disastrous consequences of young married people becoming addicted to habits that invariably lead to marital misery and often to murder.” Hype fades faster than a printer’s ink, and the hyped titles from Mr. Harry T. Hayward’s trial are almost comical, a century later: “Being a complete version of the most horrible event in the criminal history of the world,” and “Life, crimes, dying confession and execution of the celebrated Minneapolis criminal; other interesting chapters on the greatest psychological problem of the century.”