50 Best Crime Novels

Just seen at Bibliobibuli, a long list of reading suggestions for lovers of the crime genre (from the Sunday Telegraph‘s list of top fifty crime writers).

I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read.

GK Chesterton – The Complete Father Brown (1986)
Arthur Conan Doyle – The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
Edgar Allan Poe – The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
Ed McBain – King’s Ransom (2003)
Kyril Bonfiglioli – The Mortdecai Trilogy (1991)
James Ellroy – The Black Dahlia (1987)
Janwillem van der Wetering – Outsider in Amsterdam (1975)
Carl Hiaasen – Double Whammy (1987)
Dashiell Hammett – The Maltese Falcon (1930)
Dan Kavanagh – The Duffy Omnibus (1991)
Margery Allingham – The Tiger in the Smoke (1952)
Charles Dickens – Bleak House (1852-3)
Georges Simenon – The Yellow Dog (1931)
Agatha Christie – Peril at End House (1932)
Wilkie Collins – The Moonstone (1868)
Jonathan Latimer – The Fifth Grave (1941)
Ruth Rendell – The Water’s Lovely (2006) [Don’t agree with this one, found it anti-climactic and plodding.]
Ngaio Marsh – Vintage Murder (1937)
Benjamin Black (a.k.a. John Banville!) – Christine Falls (2006)
John Dickson Carr – The Hollow Man (1935)
Michael Innes – The Weight of the Evidence (1943)
Raymond Chandler – Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
Friedrich Dürrenmatt – The Pledge (1958)
Michael Gilbert – Even Murderers Take Holidays and other Mysteries (2007)
Donald Westlake – What’s So Funny? (2007)
Colin Bateman – Wild About Harry (2001)
Frances Fyfield – The Art of Drowning (2006)
Reginald Hill – Good Morning Midnight (2004)
Andrea Camilleri – The Patience of the Spider (2007)
Henning Mankell – Sidetracked (1999)
Patricia Highsmith – The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)
James Lee Burke – Black Cherry Blues (1989)
Jim Thompson – The Getaway (1959)
Walter Mosley – Devil in a Blue Dress (1991)
Denise Mina – Garnethill (1999)
Steig Larsson – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008)
Ronald Knox – The Viaduct Murder (1925)
EC Bentley – Trent’s Last Case (1913)
Lawrence Block – All the Flowers Are Dying (2005)
Edmund Crispin – Holy Disorders (1945)
William McIlvanney – Laidlaw (1977)
George V Higgins – The Rat on Fire (1981)
Dorothy L Sayers – Five Red Herrings (1931)
Anthony Boucher – The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940)
Mickey Spillane – I, the Jury (1947)
James Grady – Six Days of the Condor (1974)
George Pelecanos – The Big Blowdown (1996)
Robert Crais – The Watchman (2007)
John Lawton – Black Out (1995)
Elmore Leonard – Maximum Bob (1991)

Along with science fiction, I think crime is one of my favourite genres, so this eight out of fifty is pretty sad. Although I have read more than eight of these authors, just not the books listed: Ed McBain, Janwillem van de Wetering, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Reginald Hill, Lawrence Block, and a few of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories.