Wed 6 Oct 2010
100 Good Detective Novels, by Mike Grost
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists[15] Comments
by Mike Grost
These are all real detective stories: tales in which a mystery is solved by a detective. Real detective fiction tends to go invisible in modern society, in which many people prefer crime fiction without mystery.
The list is in chronological order but unfortunately omits many major short story writers: G. K. Chesterton, Jacques Futrelle, H. C. Bailey, Edward D. Hoch, and other greats.
Émile Gaboriau, Le Crime d’Orcival (1866)
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868)
Israel Zangwill, The Big Bow Mystery (1891)
Anna Katherine Green, The Circular Study (1900)
Edgar Wallace, The Four Just Men (1905)
Cleveland Moffett, Through the Wall (1909)
John T. McIntyre, Ashton-Kirk, Investigator (1910)
R. Austin Freeman, The Eye of Osiris (1911)
E. C. Bentley, Trent’s Last Case (1913)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear (1914)
Clinton H. Stagg, Silver Sandals (1914)
Johnston McCulley, Who Killed William Drew? (1917)
Octavus Roy Cohen, Six Seconds of Darkness (1918)
Mary Roberts Rinehart & Avery Hopwood, The Bat (1920)
Donald McGibeny, 32 Caliber (1920)
Carolyn Wells, Raspberry Jam (1920)
Freeman Wills Crofts, The Cask (1920)
A. A. Milne, The Red House Mystery (1922)
G. D. H. Cole, The Brooklyn Murders (1923)
Carroll John Daly, The Snarl of the Beast (1927)
Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1927)
Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk, Into Thin Air (1929)
Samuel Spewack, Murder in the Gilded Cage (1929)
Thomas Kindon, Murder in the Moor (1929)
Mignon G. Eberhart, While the Patient Slept (1930)
Victor L. Whitechurch, Murder at the College / Murder at Exbridge (1932)
Ellery Queen, The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932)
Anthony Abbot, About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932)
S. S. Van Dine, The Dragon Murder Case (1933)
Helen Reilly, McKee of Centre Street (1933)
Dermot Morrah, The Mummy Case (1933)
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors (1934)
Milton M. Propper, The Divorce Court Murder (1934)
John Dickson Carr, The Three Coffins / The Hollow Man (1935)
Georgette Heyer, Merely Murder / Death in the Stocks (1935)
David Frome, Mr. Pinkerton Has the Clue (1936)
Nigel Morland, The Case of the Rusted Room (1937)
Cyril Hare, Tenant for Death (1937)
Baynard Kendrick, The Whistling Hangman (1937)
Ngaio Marsh, Death in a White Tie (1938)
R. A. J. Walling, The Corpse With the Blue Cravat / The Coroner Doubts
(1938)
Dorothy Cameron Disney, Strawstacks / The Strawstack Murders (1938-1939)
Rex Stout, Some Buried Caesar (1938-1939)
Rufus King, Murder Masks Miami (1939)
Theodora Du Bois, Death Dines Out (1939)
Erle Stanley Gardner, The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939)
Agatha Christie, One Two, Buckle My Shoe / An Overdose of Death (1940)
J. J. Connington, The Four Defences (1940)
Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
Frank Gruber, The Laughing Fox (1940)
Anthony Boucher, The Case of the Solid Key (1941)
Stuart Palmer, The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941)
Kelley Roos, The Frightened Stiff (1942)
Cornell Woolrich, Phantom Lady (1942)
Frances K. Judd, The Mansion of Secrets (1942)
Helen McCloy, The Goblin Market (1943)
Anne Nash, Said With Flowers (1943)
Mabel Seeley, Eleven Came Back (1943)
Norbert Davis, The Mouse in the Mountain (1943)
Robert Reeves, Cellini Smith: Detective (1943)
Hake Talbot, The Rim of the Pit (1944)
John Rhode, The Shadow on the Cliff / The Four-Ply Yarn (1944)
Allan Vaughan Elston & Maurice Beam, Murder by Mandate (1945)
Walter Gibson, Crime Over Casco (1946)
George Harmon Coxe, The Hollow Needle (1948)
Wade Miller, Fatal Step (1948)
Alan Green, What a Body! (1949)
Hal Clement, Needle (1949)
Bruno Fischer, The Angels Fell (1950)
Jack Iams, What Rhymes With Murder? (1950)
Richard Starnes, The Other Body in Grant’s Tomb (1951)
Richard Ellington, Exit for a Dame (1951)
Lawrence G. Blochman, Recipe For Homicide (1952)
Day Keene, Wake Up to Murder (1952)
Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel (1953)
Henry Winterfeld, Caius ist ein Dummkopf / Detectives in Togas (1953)
Craig Rice, My Kingdom For a Hearse (1956)
Frances and Richard Lockridge, Voyage into Violence (1956)
Harold Q. Masur, Tall, Dark and Deadly (1956)
James Warren, The Disappearing Corpse (1957)
Seicho Matsumoto, Ten to sen (Point and Lines) (1957)
Michael Avallone, The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse (1957)
Ed Lacy, Shakedown for Murder (1958)
Lenore Glen Offord, Walking Shadow (1959)
Allen Richards, To Market, To Market (1961)
Christopher Bush, The Case of the Good Employer (1966)
Randall Garrett, Too Many Magicians (1967)
Michael Collins, A Dark Power (1968)
Merle Constiner, The Four from Gila Bend (1968)
Bill Pronzini, Undercurrent (1973)
Nicholas Meyer, The West End Horror (1976)
Thomas Chastain, Vital Statistics (1977)
William L. DeAndrea, Killed in the Ratings (1978)
Clifford B. Hicks, Alvin Fernald, TV Anchorman (1980)
Donald J. Sobol, Angie’s First Case (1981)
Kyotaro Nishimura, Misuteri ressha ga kieta (The Mystery Train
Disappears) (1982)
K. K. Beck, Murder in a Mummy Case (1986)
Jon L. Breen, Touch of the Past (1988)
Stephen Paul Cohen, Island of Steel (1988)
Earl W. Emerson, Black Hearts and Slow Dancing (1988)
Editorial Comment: This will do it for today, but I do have one more list to post. David Vineyard sent it to me this morning. It’s a followup to his previous list, consisting of what he calls “100 Important Books From Before the Golden Age.” The cutoff date for these is 1913, which is where his earlier list began. While not all of the books on this new list may be crime fiction, they’re all important to the field. Look for it soon!
October 6th, 2010 at 7:59 pm
Mike and I have only two overlapping titles: Marsh’s Death in a White Tie and Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (I’m gratified someone else shares my high opinion of this novel)! For Connington he listed The Four Defences, which in my chapter on Connington I praise too. It has one of the most ingenious puzzles of the period, though the narrative is exceptionally slow-moving (and I am a “Humdrums” fan). Thus I couldn’t place at the top for Connington.
October 6th, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Alas, I’ve never read anything by Connington. I might not even own anything by him, and it looks as though I really ought to.
October 6th, 2010 at 8:37 pm
I’ve only read two books by Connington. His books just don’t show up here in the USA much. Found “The Four Defences” (1940) in a used book store, read it, enjoyed it, put it on the list. This is not an expert choice by someone who’s read all the Connington books! The same is true of many of the other novels and authors on my list.
All of the lists this past week are full of novels I’ve never read. Lots of discoveries! They show how rich mystery fiction is.
October 6th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
I wish there were a publisher who would tackle some of these authors (besides Ramble House). Rue Morgue looked really promising for a while, but they seem to be pulling back quite a bit now.
Remember those Harper & Row classic crime paperbacks? That was a great series, but it’s not about a quarter century old.
October 6th, 2010 at 9:09 pm
I like the Anthony Abbott and Milton Propper listings too (usually you just see Queen and Van Dine when people list something else besides hardboiled). It’s a nice corrective to people’s tendency to think all Americans were writing hardboiled. In her recent talking about Detective Fiction, P.D. James essentially reduces American mystery to three people: Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald. It’s such an oversimplification.
October 7th, 2010 at 1:08 am
If you really are strict about actual detective work it is amazing how many books and writers end up getting pushed aside.
I couldn’t disagree with anything on this list, and was pleased to see Gruber, Reeves CELLINI SMITH, Rice, Woolrich, Daly, Hammett, and even Mike Avallone included since too often when you speak of detection everyone assumes you only mean the formal Golden Age type of book, forgetting that many hardboiled novels set up decent puzzles and highlighted genuine sleuthing too.
And it is nice to see some of the major American names of the period get their due as well. Despite what seems to be the popular view the American detective story isn’t just private eyes and crime novels.
Nice to see Theodora Du Bois on the list, I was starting to think I was the only one who remembered the McNeils.
October 7th, 2010 at 1:28 am
David, that’s another thing that bugs me about the usual view of these things. People often write like Chandler and Hammett and others in that school never bothered about the detection process.
Some of Hammett’s stories reminded me, actually, of Crofts (granted they’re more exciting). I think this is a point Mike Grost made on his blog.
Several of Chandler’s novels have quite interesting puzzles, I think. Books like Latimer’s The Lady in the Morgue and The Dead Don’t Care certainly have detection. A lot of readers, I suppose, simply remember the colorfulincident and forget that they are actually fair play puzzles as well.
October 7th, 2010 at 8:29 am
Curt, you can still find those Harper paperbacks. I just got a copy of THE MUMMY CASE MYSTERY.
October 7th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Thanks to everybody for the very nice comments!
David: “when you speak of detection everyone assumes you only mean the formal Golden Age type of book, forgetting that many hardboiled novels set up decent puzzles and highlighted genuine sleuthing too.”
Whole heartedly agree: there are lots of good, well-crafted detective novels in many schools: Golden Age, hard-boiled, scientific sleuths, Had I But Known, science fiction mysteries, impossible crimes, children’s books… A realistic view of mystery history brings all this out.
I’ve only read a couple of Theodora Du Bois books, found by chance in used book stores. Her medical detective anticipates all those virus hunter thrillers of today. Like Nigel Morland and Lawrence G. Blochman, she shows the vitality of Scientific Detection.
My list has only 25% British writers. I appreciate all the info on Curt’s list of Brits, many of which I haven’t read much of. And all the fascinating names on David’s and the other lists this week. So much to learn from!
April 13th, 2013 at 4:59 pm
I’m doing some background research on hard boiled PI novels (I’m writing one so I thought I’d learn about the history of the genre) and found this post. Dunno if its still active but I’m curious whether any publishers are making a decent effort to republish any of the works of these authors. Please let me know if you know any.
Thanks. Great site. I’ve learned a lot already.
April 14th, 2013 at 10:29 am
Thanks to e-books many of these as available to read again.
April 14th, 2013 at 11:18 am
There’s been a lot of activity in putting older mysteries out as ebooks, that’s for sure, but some publishers are finding a niche for themselves by publishing them in paper editions too, even a few by some really obscure authors.
July 18th, 2013 at 12:38 pm
I have been attempting to locate a mystery short story titled “The Dark Saga” the author is or was Hugh Pentecost. Last time I read the story it was located in Readers Digest Condensed Books. I would love to get a copy of this story and read it again since I believe it was a very well written Story about a down on his luck disabled Detective who managed to take down a huge Corporation, with a little help from his friends, and he managed to become a hero and lover to his beautiful secretary. Any assistance in this venture would be helpful.
Thank You for any help.
July 18th, 2013 at 1:23 pm
Mike, Here you go:
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1981
Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Doors to Mystery,
Queen, Ellery, Editor
Published by Dial Press/Davis Publications, Inc., New York , 1981
November 24th, 2013 at 4:59 pm
Thanks for this. I am writing an article on Nancy Barr Mavity. I have come at her through an interest in her biographical work but need to confront her mysteries. Thought I could do a crash course in mystery novels by reading through the list you have here.