Part 1
Well, face it, lists of great detective stories are even more arbitrary than lists of great movies. What are the criteria? Does it matter that Raymond Chandler was a much better writer than John Dickson Carr? It does to teachers of undergraduate fiction classes–Chandler is often assigned, Carr never–but otherwise, there’s no clear reason to believe that Chandler’s style and wit are preferable to Carr’s brilliance as a plotter and deceiver: to be deceived is what we hope for when reading a mystery. The closest I can come to explaining my own criteria, is as follows.
There are basically two poles of mystery/detection fiction. At one extreme there’s the would-be realistic–“I’m reading about the real world ”--or what it would be like if it had the schematic outline of fictional narratives. The police procedural, of which Ed McBain is the most famous practitioner, is the most familiar instance of the type–see #8 below; certain types of "psychological" mystery (e.g., Ruth Rendell) also aim at this goal. At the other extreme is the fabulous tale, which tries not to imitate reality but to depict a world in which apparently incredible things seem to happen, yet still somehow all make sense in the end: see #1 below.
That I’ve rated what I consider the best example of realism #8 and the best example of the fabulous #1, sufficiently establishes my own preference scale, making it easier for you to judge the judger. But the main point is that most mystery novels are some amalgam of both, Chandler being the best example of someone who can convey a feeling of urban “reality” while spinning romantic tales of La-La Land.
What I look for then, is the striking of a satisfying balance between those poles. No realism at all, and we’re in the land of the purely fabulous, or magical realism, where no logic applies and thus there can be no sense of satisfaction in following the deductive process inherent in the mystery genre. Too much realism, and we lose the pleasure of immersion in the special world of the creative imagination, as opposed to mere reportage. (E.g., McBain’s cops are much wittier than most real cops, or people, for that matter.) That said, I apply my own response to the works: how well do they establish, maintain, and resolve the tension that mystery writing is all about? How badly do I want to reread them; and again?
Of course, the notion that any group of creative works of any kind ( or of college football teams for that matter) can be rated from 1 through 50 is even more absurd than the idea of creating such a list at all. Paul Schrader recently published a list of 66 “best films of all time” in the journal Film Comment. I agreed with about a third of the list, though not especially their order, and thought that we’d had an exceptional meeting of minds–and this in a creative arena for which it is much easier to suggest formal criteria (dozens of critics have tried with varying success to do exactly that) than it is for popular fiction. So I’ll say only that my degree of confidence at the top of the list is extremely high, but descends sharply towards the bottom of the list. I could easily think of another dozen books to replace some of those listed there. So I’ve added “additional thoughts” at the end; if you like mysteries the more the merrier.
In any event, the main thing is my expectation that anyone who enjoys mysteries will enjoy most, if not all, of the fifty and more great ones listed here. And these are mysteries; I’ve omitted great suspense fiction (e.g., Lucille Fletcher’s Sorry Wrong Number, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, Cornell Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black) and great spy stories (e.g., Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios) or thriller/adventure stories (e.g., Thomas Perry’s “Jane Whitefield” series). Rush to read all of these if you haven’t already. But to be considered for inclusion among these recommendations, a novel has to be primarily about crime and detection; about our pleasure in trying to figure out, as the title of one of the finest books about detective fiction has it, What Will Have Happened?
The list:
1. The Red Right Hand (Joel Townsley Rogers, 1945)
The most notorious unreliable narrator in the history of fiction is the “Watson” of Agatha Christie’s Who Killed Roger Ackroyd, but as Edmund Wilson famously wrote, “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?” If we don't, it's because Christie doesn’t generate enough intensity of involvement. But ah, The Red Right Hand! A car careens across the Connecticut countryside, driven by a rampaging madman, leaving death and destruction in its wake. It comes to a halt in a cul-de-sac past a crossroads at which the protagonist/narrator has been standing–but he claims not to have seen it go by! As he sits alone in the cottage of one of the victims, surrounded by suspicious policemen, hearing the screams of more victims in the distance, and feeling that a killer is creeping nearer, he painstakingly sets down the events that have landed him at the center of this maelstrom. But on page after page, bizarre coincidences pile up self-incriminating evidence, and give reason to doubt not just the veracity but even the possibility of the blood-curdling story he’s telling us. Rogers wrote only one other mystery, and it wasn’t very good. This one is awesome.
2. The Detective (Roderick Thorp, 1966)
One of the most intense feelings of pleasure a reader can get from mystery or suspense fiction is that of the moment when the seemingly unrelated strands of an ambiguously coherent narrative suddenly come to together in a flash of insight. The Detective is the very best of all such narratives of detection; when I read it for the first time I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen what was coming–but I hadn’t. Made into a bad movie with Frank Sinatra.
3, The Burning Court (John Dickson Carr, 1937)
Carr was the absolute master of the “impossible crime” novel, primarily through the plot device of “the locked room.” This is as close as possible to being an unassailably authoritative statement about detective fiction, in that no historian of the genre would dream of disagreeing with it. What makes this his best work is that an atmosphere of the seemingly supernatural, which he was especially skillful at generating in his earlier works, is here combined with a shudder of eroticism that like most detective story writers of the “classical” period he usually avoided; and with a startlingly ambiguous ending that is unique in the genre.
4. Past Caring (Robert Goddard, 1986)
Goddard’s first novel is every bit the equal of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, with which it has much in common, but as a more obvious piece of genre writing it never achieved the latter’s fame. You will read the beginning and ending over and over, not to work out what has happened, which is finally clear at the end of a wonderfully plotted mystery, but to try to decide what you, the reader, want to happen next. Like Possession, it combines a flawed and misjudged hero–one of the most believable underdog heroes in fiction–with an impossible romance: or is it?
5. Farewell My Lovely (Raymond Chandler, 1940)
Nothing more really needs to be said about Chandler, except perhaps that it’s very difficult to choose his “best” novel. Of them all, Farewell My Lovely to my mind most persuasively combines Philip Marlowe’s romanticism and epigrammatic wit (out of the same humorist stable that includes Mark Twain, S. J. Perelman, and Groucho Marx) with a good mystery–and the descent into the Inferno that was always Chandler’s deep-down theme.
6. The Master of the Day of Judgment (Leo Perutz, 1930; English translation 1962)
To say anything specific about this mystery–one of only two non-English language works among these fifty, about which more later–would be to say too much. Suffice it to quote from Anthony Boucher’s “Introduction” to the English Language edition: “The Master starts off as a formal period drama of Vienna in 1909...suggestive of a play by Schnitzler. It shifts into a straight detective story, then into a tale of supernatural terror, then finally into an ending as Viennese as the beginning–if you recall that Vienna is the cradle of psychoanalysis. Like every story of Perutz’s, it creates its own form and sets, rather than follows, precedents.”
7. The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (Sebastien Japrisot [Jean Baptiste-Rossi], 1968; translated from the French)
To quote one reviewer, “unputdownable.” Each time I finish rereading it, I sigh with satisfaction at having finally committed to memory the magician’s sleight-of-hand; and before long have forgotten exactly how it worked and have to start all over again. As the overwrought but accurate paperback cover has it, “Shooting someone to death from hundreds of miles away isn’t possible. Nor is driving so fast that you’re back before you’ve left. Finding traces of yourself everywhere you’ve never been; looking for a killer only to discover it’s you yourself; trying to escape when you’re also the victim!” One more (perhaps) “unreliable narrator,” this one a woman, Dany Longo is one of the great heroines of genre fiction. Could go as high as #2.
8. The Last Known Address (William Harrington, 1965)
See my introductory comment. This is the best of all pure police procedurals. Lieutenant Kerrigan, an (unfairly) disgraced detective, is recalled from the bottom of the barrel and assigned to look for a missing witness, not because his superiors think he will succeed but so that they can cover their asses. (Think of Clint Eastwood in The Gauntlet.) He and a reluctant side-kick, a rookie female cop, set out along a cold trail, trudging from doorway to doorway, interviewing neighbors and acquaintances who know nothing, starting hares that instantly disappear down false trails, until he recalls one offhand remark...Harrington wrote several other “Kerrigan” mysteries, all worth reading, but you do have to have a tolerance for plodding.
9. The Three Coffins (Carr, 1935)
Most famous for the definitive “locked room” lecture that Carr’s detective Gideon Fell gives in the midst of the definitive “locked room” mystery. The murder can’t possibly have happened as witnessed–but it did. Like The Burning Court, a masterpiece of the uncanny, though without the former’s hint of the supernatural. Carr also wrote under the name of “Carter Dickson;” the only difference conveyed by the different names is that Fell, along with Inspector Henri Bencolin, belongs to Carr and Sir Henry Merrivale to Dickson.
10. The Franchise Affair (Josephine Tey, 1949)
Tey based her contemporary novel on an 18th Century trial, one of the most famous trials in English history. A young girl accuses two women of having kidnapped her and held her captive for two weeks. They deny everything and say they have never seen her–but she can describe the room in which they supposedly held her captive perfectly! It ends with a wonderfully realized courtroom drama, including a climactic cross-examination.
11. Warrant for X (Philip McDonald, 1931)
Shades of Sorry Wrong Number: A blind man sitting in a restaurant overhears a conversation and realizes that a kidnapping is being plotted. He finds his way to a private investigator, Colonel Anthony Gethryn, who sets out to forestall the event with no clues other than the cryptic words of the conspirators. A classic of pure detection, it was made into a barely adequate movie, 23 Paces to Baker Street, with Van Johnson.
12. The House of the Arrow (A. E. W. Mason, 1924)
Inspector Hanaud sees a wisp of smoke curling from the chimney of a French villa, and as it rises he realizes the solution to a baffling mystery. Mason engagingly mixes pure deduction a la Holmes with such exotica as secret passages, stolen jewelry, and the unmasking of a culprit whose identity will surprise all readers, and make some unhappy. A prolific English writer, Mason is most famous for his novel The Four Feathers; but his Running Water is one of my all-time favorite adventure stories. It features an imaginatively realized heroine who defies conventional loyalties and death threats as she follows “the one law last broken–the law that what you know, that you must do, if by doing it you can save a life.”
13. And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie, 1939)
Unlike Christie’s conventional Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries, this suspenseful novel is unconventional and spine-tingling. Ten strangers, invited to a mysterious island from which they cannot escape, are being knocked off one by one. Everyone left has a perfect alibi; at last only our hero and heroine remain. The film cheats on the ending, but some readers will prefer it.
14. The Big Clock (Kenneth Fearing, 1946)
Twice filmed, once brilliantly in the 40s with Ray Milland, and the second time updated (drastically) as No Way Out with Kevin Costner. A reporter is assigned by his publisher to investigate a murder that he witnessed and for which he is being framed; and twist and turn as he might, his investigation comes closer and closer to implicating...himself. Fearing was primarily a poet; like Rogers he wrote only one other mystery beside his classic, and it wasn’t nearly as good.
15. Dead Famous (Carol O’Connell, 2003)
I’m tempted to say, the best living detective story writer...but let the temptation pass. There are very few contemporary mysteries among these recommendations. It takes a while to confirm the status of any esthetic experience; a mystery especially requires rereading for this purpose–if it can’t be reread, it probably doesn’t belong on a list of “greats.” Dead Famous (which can be reread) is the first of these exceptions, because around policewoman Kathy Mallory, an over-the-top, totally implausible, and sociopathic (but vulnerable) heroine, O’Connell has fashioned a series of tall tales that have no equivalent. They should be read in sequence, but if that’s not possible, this one–the seventh--shouldn’t be missed. Two relentless and powerful women, one bent on vengeance, duel to trap a serial killer. But is the vengeful woman, as Mallory suspects, bent on murder; or even the actual killer herself? –An interesting aspect of the Mallory novels is that superheroines are usually (though not always) the creation of male authors–a fact that any Freudian analyst would have no difficulty explaining. O’Connell is definitely not a male author!
16. Arrow Pointing Nowhere (Elizabeth Daly, 1944)
Daly’s Henry Gamadge was a rare book and manuscript expert, once the most suave and least violent of all amateur detectives, later a member in good standing of the FBI, dealing mostly with the rich and well-born of Edith Wharton territory. In this story, he receives a crumpled envelope, originally addressed to a rare book dealer and readdressed to himself, that has been dropped from the window of a Whartonian mansion. Inside it contains only the scrawled message, “Recommend early visit to inspect interesting curiosa. Discretion.” Like Colonel Gethryn of Warrant for X, he deduces an entire scenario from this slight communication and sets out in pursuit of what turns out to be a dangerous and twisted murder plot. Daly’s eerie, skin-crawling Evidence of Things Seen (1943) also belongs here.
17. Red Harvest (Dashiell Hammett, 1928)
“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.” Hammett, the founder of the “hard-boiled” school of fiction, was one of the most influential writers in American history. Andre Gide called Red Harvest “the greatest American novel." That was probably intended as a cultural put-down, but Red Harvest was surely seminal. A story about union-busting (with which Hammett the ex-Pinkerton was too familiar) it’s the most politically conscious of American detective novels, at least until Sara Paretsky came along (#36 below). But even V.I. Warshawski isn’t as tough as the Continental Op.
18. Drury Lane’s Last Case (Ellery Queen, 1933; originally published as by “Barnaby Ross”)
Another mystery about which the less revealed the better. Queen’s Drury Lane, a gentleman detective like Gamadge, had three earlier cases–The Tragedy of X, The Tragedy of Y, and The Tragedy of Z–and all of them repay reading; this one was indeed his last. Queen (actually Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee), who was better known for his eponymous amateur detective (also the hero of a long-running radio program), was the most inventive plotter of all detective story writers, ever. The Tragedy of Z introduces an ancillary detective, Sally Thumm, who at the end outdoes the great man himself.
19. The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (Andrew Laing, 1934)
Long out of print but available from Amazon.com, it is well worth the search. One of those novels that is presented as having come to the publishers from a “reputable literary agent, who claims to be as ignorant as we are of the author’s identity,” it takes place in a small Maine town in which monstrously deformed children are being born. The narrator/diarist writes of having “been drawn unwillingly into a sequence of grim events, of which “the climax could yet be my own death.” It may well be...
20. The Weird World of Wes Beattie (John Norman Harris, 1963)
A Canadian mystery, just reprinted. Wes Beattie, an “obscure bank clerk” and apparently friendless congenital liar, stands accused of a murder for which he had means, motive, and opportunity; his only defense is a fantastic story of conspiracy against him by a “strange and sinister” gang of alleged criminals who appear not to exist. At a seminar of “doctors, lawyers, and social workers,” a psychiatrist presents his case as one of dissociation from reality. Sidney Grant, a not-very-attractive lawyer, sets out to run down Wes’s lies in the hope of proving to him that they are lies, so that he can be persuaded to stop lying, and plea bargain out from under a potential death penalty. But Wes turns out to have some friends after all, including a courageous aunt and a dynamic and attractive sister, and things are not always what they seem.
21. The Deadly Percheron (John Franklin Bardin, 1946)
There’s no writer quite like Bardin, and no book quite like this one. He wrote three mysteries, collected in The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus, that are nightmarish, hallucinatory, and surreal. In The Deadly Percheron a horse can indeed be deadly–and that’s the least of it. The story begins with a shaggy dog story: a client walks into the narrator/psychiatrist’s office wearing a hibiscus in his hair, and explains that a little man named Joe, wearing a purple suit, gives him ten dollars a day to wear it. And there are other little men...who, like Wes Beattie’s sinister gang, turn out to be more than figments of an apparently (but not) harmless delusion.
22. Phantom Lady (William Irish, 1942; pseudonym of Cornell Woolrich)
Woolrich/Irish, author of novels and short stories that eventually became the movies Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, and quite a few others, is generally considered to be the best suspense writer of all time. His specialty was “the ticking clock,” and Phantom Lady is the most exciting example of the genre he made his own, as well as being a true detective story. A desperate woman races against time to save her condemned fiancé from execution for a murder that she alone is sure he didn’t commit. Descending into a nightmarish urban landscape, she searches out witnesses who one by one disappear or are murdered before she can reach them; the clock is ticking. Robert Siodmak’s film noir of the novel is one of the best in that genre; and Ella Raines’s fierce intensity makes her one of its most compelling heroines.
23. Rainbow Drive (Thorp, 1986)
Another version of a narrative in which apparently unrelated plot threads come together; almost as good as The Detective. It’s based on the 1981 Hollywood “Wonderland murders,” (the subject of a recent movie by that name), involving rival drug gangs, in which porn star John Holmes was involved. More than any other recent novel this one gives the feel of L.A. as a hotbed of corruption in high places and low–if that comports with your view of things. The rest of Thorp’s fiction, e.g., Die Hard etc., is worthless.
24. A Small Town in Germany (John Le Carre, 1968)
Le Carre’s George Smiley is a spy, not a detective, and the inclusion of one of his tales on this list is thus questionable. But A Small Town... belongs to the same sub-genre as The Detective and Rainbow Drive; in this case the search for a missing man produces a series of clues that suddenly cohere in a shocking revelation. Like all of Le Carre’s novels, it’s political as much as it is a thriller; not perhaps the best of them, it still belongs on a list of “best mysteries.”
25. A Stranger in My Grave (Margaret Millar, 1960)
Millar and her husband (John) Ross Macdonald were, until the Kellermans and the Kings came along, the most successful writing couple in the chronicles of genre fiction. What was extraordinary about their careers was the eerie similarity of their narrative conventions. In her books, there is always one character, so to speak, too many; or too few. Two people will turn out to be really one, or one to be two; the story involves not just the solution to a crime but the uncovering of an identity. In his books, analogously, Lew Archer, often functioning more as a psychoanalyst than a private eye, uncovers incestuous or murderously Oedipal secrets from a buried past. Perhaps the concealed father figure of his mysteries is the missing person of hers?
To be continued...
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