Edna Buchanan

Edna Buchanan (born March 16, 1939) is an American journalist and writer best known for her crime mystery novels.

Buchanan was born "Edna Rydzik" in Paterson, New Jersey. She attended Montclair State College. As one of the first female crime journalists in Miami, she wrote for the Miami Beach Daily Sun and The Miami Herald as a general assignment and police beat reporter. She won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting "for her versatile and consistently excellent police beat reporting".

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

Buchanan's autobiographical book "The Corpse Had A Familiar Face" inspired two TV Movies starring Elizabeth Montgomery "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face" (1994) and "Deadline for Murder: From the Files of Edna Buchanan" (1995). Her novel "Nobody Lives Forever" was made into a TV Movie in 1998.

Buchanan was embarrassed in 1990 when she was quoted extensively in the book Blue Thunder: How the Mafia Owned and Finally Murdered Cigarette Boat King Donald Aronow, by Thomas Burdick and Charlene Mitchell.

Burdick ... led her to believe that he was seeking only background information, never used a tape recorder or took notes, asked her to hypothesize about people and situations, then quoted her as if she were stating fact.

According to Buchanan, she tried to have her name and the quotes removed from the book after she read the galley proofs, but she was told by the publisher that it was too late.

Fiction

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