Edna Buchanan

Edna Buchanan (née Rydzik, born March 16, 1939) is an American journalist and writer who is best known for her crime mystery novels. She won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting "for her versatile and consistently excellent police beat reporting."

Early life and education Buchanan was born in Paterson, New Jersey. In high school she worked in a coat factory and after graduating she worked, along with her mother, at a Western Electric plant. She attended Montclair State College, where she took a creative writing course and was encouraged to become a writer. She and her mother took a vacation to Miami Beach and, according to Buchanan, she knew as soon as she walked off the plane that she wanted to leave Paterson.

Her book Miami, It's Murder was nominated for an Edgar Award in 1995.

Buchanan was profiled by Calvin Trillin in a 1986 piece for The New Yorker. The article was included in Trillin's anthologies Killings (1984), American Stories (1991), and The Lede (2024).

Buchanan is featured in the 2018 documentary film The Last Resort.

As of December 2023, Buchanan was living in a nursing home in Homestead.

Books

Fiction Nobody Lives Forever (1990) Naked Came the Manatee (Putnam, 1996), by Buchanan and 12 others Pulse (1998) Legally Dead (2008) A Dark and Lonely Place (2011)

Britt Montero Series Contents Under Pressure (1992) Miami, It's Murder (1994) Suitable for Framing (1995) Act of Betrayal (1996) Margin of Error (1997) Garden of Evil (1999) You Only Die Twice (2001) The Ice Maiden (2002) Love Kills (2007)

Craig Burch Series Cold Case Squad (2004) Shadows (2005)

Nonfiction Carr, Five Years of Rape and Murder: from the personal account of Robert Frederick Carr III, 1979 The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America's Hottest Beat, 1987 Never Let Them See You Cry: More from Miami, America's Hottest Beat, 1992 Vice: Life and Death on the Streets of Miami, 1992