After a career in the theatre, in which he worked as a stage manager and producer, Jonathan Goodman came before the public as a sleuth and crime historian, with the publication in 1969 of The Killing of Julia Wallace. The book had its genesis in a period in the mid-1960s when Goodman was working at the Liverpool Playhouse.

The murder in Liverpool in 1931 of Julia Wallace had always puzzled those with an interest in forensic matters. William Herbert Wallace, a reticent insurance collector, had been convicted of murdering his wife by a Liverpool jury and sentenced to death. But the verdict was overturned on appeal, on grounds of lack of evidence, and Wallace was freed. Shunned by society, he was to die of kidney disease 18 months later.

Wallace’s alibi was that he had received a telephone call at his chess club asking him to meet a man at a Liverpool address with a view to dicussing the sale of an insurance policy to him. The address given proved to be non-existent and, Wallace claimed, he spent some time wandering about the streets looking for it.

Finding himself in the city where the crime had been committed, Goodman, who had worked as a director on the ITV police drama No Hiding Place, went to the Wallace address, 29 Wolverton Street, Anfield, and after drinking in the atmosphere of that unprepossessing street, decided to try to get to the bottom of the mystery.

In spite of the apparent implausibility of Wallace’s alibi, he found, after going closely through the trial transcripts and talking to lawyers, witnesses and police officers who had been involved in the trial, that it was, in fact watertight. Wallace had been spotted by a milk boy in the area of Liverpool he claimed to have been and there simply would not have been time for him to make the train journeys necessary to return and accomplish the murder.

Goodman went one better, and tracked down at a house in Camberwell, South London, a man, Richard Gordon Parry, whom Wallace had accused at his trial of committing the crime. Goodman confronted Parry, who cursed him from his doorstep. Parry had therefore to feature as “Mr X” in the book and was not named until after his death in 1980.

Goodman’s book was a sensation and was the first of numerous other chronicles of true-life crime from his pen, which sometimes fingered villains years after the event. Among a host of titles, which included books on the trials of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Ruth Ellis and Edward Crippen, Goodman also wrote a number of crime novels, as well as compiling a series of anthologies of famous murder cases.

Jonathan Walter Goodman was born in 1931. After National Service in the RAF, theatrical ambitions led him into countrywide rep as a stage manager and producer, a period caught in a volume of poetry Matinée Idylls (1954). In 1959 he married Susan Wylie-Harris. Over the next few years he wrote four novels including Criminal Tendencies and Hello Cruel World, Goodbye (both 1964). He also directed a number of episodes of No Hiding Place. In 1965 he joined a technical publishing house as an editor, continuing there after publication of The Killing of Julia Wallace.

“Brutality is part of man’s character,” Goodman had written in one poem, and this aperçu he now turned to varied account. Bloody Versicles: Rhymes of Crime (1971) grew from his hobby (“the one that costs me least”) of collecting popular verse inspired by crime. Also that year Goodman published Posts-Mortem, a collection of interesting letters written in and around murder. In the 1970s Goodman also edited the Celebrated Trials series.

This work inspired his best novel, the witty The Last Sentence (1978), about a true-crime writer caught up in the aftermath of the murder of a man himself unmasked for a killing 30 years earlier.

By 1982 he had decided to live from his writing. He produced a number of compilations to which others contributed essays, including Lady Killers (1990) and The Country House Murders (1987): railways, the stage and the seaside were among other criminal territories that he explored in his books.

His incisively magpie mind, and teeming shelves, were evident in Who He? (1984), an encylopedia of such curious facts as the continuing Twelfth Night custom at Drury Lane of consuming the wine and cake funded by a bequest from Robert Baddeley “who was first a pastrycook, then a gentleman’s gentleman before he became an actor at Drury Lane in 1761. He died at the theatre 33 years later, while dressing for his most famous part, Moses in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, which he had created in 1777.”

In The Stabbing of George Harry Storrs (1983) Goodman deduced that a German had come over to avenge a pregnant servant driven to suicide. In 1920 there had been The Slaying of Joseph Bowne Elwell (1987) in Manhattan where bridge-playing brought a stock-exchange fortune, and women. Even more engrossing is another 1931 case, The Passing of Starr Faithfull (1990) — her body found on an American shore was perhaps a Mob matter.

Goodman’s contacts were wide, and included the Columbia University historian of ideas Jacques Barzun, who thought him “the greatest living master of true-crime literature”. He was one of the few lay members of the British Academy of Forensic Sciences.

Goodman’s marriage was dissolved.

Jonathan Goodman, crime writer, was born on January 17, 1931. He died on January 10, 2008, aged 76