The History of Mystery

#10: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.  First line of dialogue in the continuing saga of Philip Marlowe: “Tall, aren’t you?” she said. [and Marlowe replies:] “I didn’t mean to be.”

That’s Philip Marlowe for you, in Raymond Chandler’s first novel starring the wisecracking tough-guy detective. Just as cynical as Sam Spade but much funnier, and just as cynically convinced of the inherent corruption of American soci...

#11: The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie.  In which Hercule Poirot solves the case of an apparent serial killer, obsessed with the A.B.C. train schedules, who is picking off random victims whose first, middle and last names start with the same letter of the alphabet...or is he?

So, I can only pick two Agatha Christies, so logically that means I am arguing that The A.B.C. Murders is Agatha Christie's second-best book.  And I am, I mean it.  Not that there w...

#12: A Tan and Sandy Silence, by John D. MacDonald.

With the exception of the four Sherlock Holmes novels, the Travis Magee novels of John D MacDonald are the earliest series I read as a youth where I basically have an excellent memory of each one. I was younger when I read all the Agatha Christies but most now run together, and I reread In the Heat of the Night and the Big Sleep to write this blog, but the 21 Travis Magee novels are vividly different in my memory...

#13...The Maltese Falcon...by Dashiell Hammett.  One of my favorite things about The Maltese Falcon is the tale of how John Huston happened to make such a great movie of it.  Two adaptations before Huston's had flopped and he was basically an unknown when he proposed to take a third crack at it.  The first two versions had made major changes in Hammett's tale, and Huston suggested, why not just film the book?  The dialogue in the book became the script, Husto...

#14: Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith.  I do not know if Martin Cruz Smith originally intended Gorky Park to be a stand-alone and didn't intend to write a sequel; eight years separated the two books.  Add Red Square, Havana Bay and Wolves eat Dogs, and you have an incredible run of five outstanding novels featuring the same detective, the latter four of which far too few people have read.  Stop reading this and read Polar Star right...

#15 is The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.  When I was a teenager and thought that exploring the world of mystery meant reading everything Agatha Christie ever wrote (not that there was anything wrong with that), I would notice the ads in magazines and newspapers to get 10 best-selling mysteries for a dollar on some variation on that theme.  Sometimes there would be fifty little book stamps that one could choose from by pasting them to the ret...

#16: In the Heat of the Night by John Ball.  We are at or near the 40th anniversary of this masterpiece.  I have started re-reading it and I have to say it is alarming to realize that being arrested for being black in the wrong place was how this one starts and we have not graduated from that in this country so many years later.  So ITHOTN is a powerful mystery and a powerful novel of social importance, probably the only entry in my Top 20 that succeeds on both levels.&#...

#17: Pagan Babies by Elmore Leonard.  I might get some flak on this choice.  I'm sure no one objects to the inclusion of Elmore Leonard on any list of the greatest mystery craftsmen or craftswomen.  He is also one of the big three mystery authors who were also outstanding writers, along with John D MacDonald and Raymond Chandler: each should have won a Pulitzer Prize.  His renowned plainness and directness of prose, unforgettable characters, and hard to imitate, and...

#18.  The Woman in White - Willkie Collins.  Not easy to pick this one over The Moonstone, and Willkie was just getting one on the list.  Both books are surprisingly tedious, The Woman in White slightly less so.  While A Study in Scarlet arrived in 1887 at a trim 14 chapters, The Woman in White (1859) had a bloated 57.  I also listened to it on audiotape and frequently begged the universe to get along with the story.  On the other hand...

#19: The Firm by John Grisham.  I have a great respect for someone who published two best-sellers a year, but I must admit that I have not kept up with Grisham.  I liked The Client but was a bit nonplussed at The Pelican Brief which seemed to rigidly follow a formula where the protagonists run to someone, and that someone is killed, and then they run to someone else, and that someone is killed, and then...  But it was listening to The Partner, where ...