The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett, 1930 ★★★★

A Gumshoe Who Sticks

Fans of hard-boiled detective fiction know what they want. Fast plotting, snappy patter, just enough violence or the threat of same to keep it interesting, and not too much of the mushy stuff.

The Maltese Falcon not only delivers on all those points, it works the template to perfection. Just reading the first two chapters awakens you to the fact that before they were tropes, such things as mysterious dames and foggy crime scenes could be so evocative and alive.

Making it all snap together is the dynamic central character of Sam Spade, a tough-talking detective with honest-to-God principles, most especially that no one’s gonna make a sap of him.

The Man Who Knew Too Much – G. K. Chesterton, 1922 ★

No Justice, Please, We're British

The biggest mystery in this collection of mystery stories is why G. K. Chesterton is so renowned for writing them. Going by the evidence of this book alone, building a mystery was not something the man did well.

The eight tales all feature Horne Fisher, a brilliant yet somewhat languid product of upper-class Great Britain, back when class still meant something. In each story, Fisher analyzes a particular situation, offers up a few paradoxical aphorisms, leaps to some bizarre conclusion that Chesterton strains to show as somehow exactly right, then explains to his reporter friend Harold March why he won’t do a single thing to right whatever wrong has been committed.

Candyland: A Novel In Two Parts – Evan Hunter & Ed McBain, 2001 ★★★★½

Tag Team of One Makes Winning Combination

If schizophrenia is not merely talking to yourself but answering, what is it when a famous novelist partners up with his own nom de plume? 

Evan Hunter wrote some popular novels around broad social themes like juvenile delinquency, homophobia, and racism. Ed McBain wrote the famous 87^th Precinct crime novels and countless other mysteries. Candyland brings the pair together, for the first and only time.

It is a nifty idea for a novel which delivers on the page, Hunter’s faculty for writing in sensational, pinpoint detail about a particular human ill developing naturally into McBain covering its criminal aftermath. As a bonus, you get a suspenseful underlying meta-mystery of how and/or if these two plot threads will come together in the end.

Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith, 1981 ★★★★½

A Mystery Wrapped inside an Enigma

Gorky Park dances on the narrow boundaries of genre fiction, a mystery that slides into straight crime fiction where a psychotic killer is pursued by a detective who runs an entire police force but can trust no one. And it is set in Soviet Russia, so there is much social commentary, too.

The challenge for me came not in enjoying it but wondering how its author managed to hold everything together all the way to its bloody, satisfying conclusion. Gorky Park is not a thrill ride – it is much too deliberately paced – but it delivers satisfaction across genres and some unexpected insights into the human condition.

Not to mention stark Russian atmosphere. I can’t think of a novel that sucked me so completely into another time and place as this one did.

Proof – Dick Francis, 1984 ★★★½

Whisky Business

Life can change cruelly and suddenly for reasons infinitesimally small. What can you do when this happens to you?

For liquor merchant Tony Beach, the answer comes in the form of an odd quest to uncover a conspiracy involving counterfeit spirits, hijacked trucks, and a little murder.

And being this is a Dick Francis novel, some racehorses, too, though not so much as we might expect.

A Taste For Death – P. D. James, 1986 ★½

Too Many Notes

Reading this brought to mind a line in that great Mozart movie Amadeus, when Wolfgang asks the Habsburg court why their emperor doesn’t like his latest piece. One courtier answers: “Too many notes.”

It’s a comic scene, and on the face of it ridiculous, particularly directed at Mozart. But I kind of knew what that hapless lackey meant. There can be too much of a good thing, at least as I see it, a surplus of invention, particularly when it comes to writing mysteries.

Thus came my wonderment and annoyance about this novel. P. D. James’ ability to create involving, multi-dimensional characters and settings ultimately gets in the way of what a mystery should be about.

The Body In The Library – Agatha Christie, 1942 ★★★

Murder Most Cozy

When you read a book that helped spawn an entire subgenre, you tend to look for signs of aborning fecundity.

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is to cozy mysteries what James Bond is to spy fiction: The first name that springs to mind when discussing the genre. Think murder in a quiet town, a dash of elegant humor and no big emotions, and you think Marple.

The Alienist – Caleb Carr, 1994 ★½

Murder and Psychiatry at the Turn of the Century

Welcome to 1896. The art of police investigation means knowing how much to club a suspect until he talks. Moving through Manhattan boulevards requires a keen eye for pools of urine and horse manure. Psychiatrists are so sinister in the public consciousness they are known as “alienists” and regarded with fear and loathing.

It is a bleak and dangerous time, even more so when New York City discovers its own version of London’s Jack the Ripper on the loose.

A Shilling For Candles – Josephine Tey, 1936 ★★

Murder, She Shrugged

There is a certain type of mystery reader for whom the mystery itself is secondary. The mystery services a formula, follows a pattern, and provides background contrast to whatever aspect of the book it is the reader cares about. It is not taken seriously.

I don’t understand these kind of mystery readers, but they evidently exist in fair-enough number to promote the legacies of writers who cater to this approach. Which leads me to Josephine Tey.

Evil Under The Sun – Agatha Christie, 1941 ★★★

Score Another for Monsieur Poirot

Characters who employ multiple secret identities, dialogue scenes that turn out staged for a listener, red herrings, U-turns, left-field clues, secondary characters who portend nothing but offer strategic diversion at critical intervals: These are devices one not only expects but comes to appreciate reading Agatha Christie novels.

Shroud For A Nightingale – P. D. James, 1971 ★★★½

Death Visits the Nurses's Wing

A mystery can be too good to properly enjoy when one of two things get in the way: 1) Getting too invested in one possible outcome to the point of resenting another the author goes with instead, or 2) Being so caught up that you race through the final pages and miss key details.

I think Shroud For A Nightingale might have been for me an example of the first. I definitely did not rush the ending, but it still caught me short. I found myself more interested in the red herrings than the final solution.

The Black Mountain – Rex Stout, 1954 [No Stars]

A Mountain Not Worth Climbing

There are two kinds of challenges reading a mystery novel. One is figuring out the guilty party. The other is soldiering through when the plot doesn’t gel, characters are dense and/or unsympathetic, the setting is bland and thin, and you don’t give a damn whodunit. The Black Mountain proved a textbook example of this latter experience.

Masterpieces Of Mystery: The Golden Age, Part I – Compiled by Ellery Queen, 1977 ★★

What Was So Golden about the Golden Age?

Detective fiction long ago moved from the whodunit to the whydunit; today it often employs a complicated, psychological approach. So what can be learned from this anthology of mystery writers from its simpler Golden Age?

Do any of them still stand up to modern scrutiny, apart from Agatha Christie, still the reigning Shakespeare of the form? After reading through these 350 pages, I’m still wondering.

The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie, 1926 ★★★★½

Murder Most Sharp

Diabolical is the word to describe this wonderful mystery novel, as twisted as a vine and as charming as a cuckoo clock. Those who might question the notion of a tea-cozy mystery blowing a reader’s mind (much like me, back when) will most likely enjoy this happy rebuke.

Critics have called this the best of the Christie novels; many place it in the top ten of crime fiction overall. In terms of mechanical skill, there’s nothing to argue with there. Nor will I do too much explaining, it being a matter of spoilers. More even than most mysteries, you have that issue here.

High Stakes – Dick Francis, 1975 ★★½

Hard-Charging Mystery Hangs on at the Turn

If you know Dick Francis already and want more of his mystery fiction, here’s another gripping if formulaic excursion into the underside of life, connected in this case rather firmly to Francis’s home turf, the world of horse-racing.

If you are a Francis novice, High Stakes isn’t exactly the type to make you a fan.

A feeling of being run through the motions hangs over this crime novel, not unlike finding yourself inside one of the wheel-driven devices with which, we come to discover, the main character has made himself a mint.

The Daughter Of Time – Josephine Tey, 1951 ★½

Reconstructing Richard

What history got wrong Josephine Tey attempts to make right in this polemic disguised as a police procedural. Your miles may vary, but for me this was a tedious read even when I found worthwhile Tey's arguments regarding the nature of one of Great Britain's most infamous rulers.

Inspector Alan Grant, laid up with a broken leg after pursuing a criminal and stuck staring at the ceiling, kills time by investigating a double murder that occurred nearly 500 years before. Using a number of books at his bedside, as well as the research abilities of an able assistant, he probes the question of Richard III.

Was he really as bad a fellow as history said? What was the real story of his most famous crime, murdering two boys, his crown's rightful heir Prince Edward and his younger brother Duke Richard, in the Tower of London?

And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie, 1939 ★★★★½

Putting on a Master Class in Murder

The image of Agatha Christie today is so often interlaid with that of crumpets and cosies, wet-weather ruminations, and dignified Belgians with luxuriant moustaches that one might almost suspect her the author of Tintin comics rather than some of the darkest and most fiendish mysteries of our time.

A quick corrective is on tap in the form of this, one of her blackest and most revered thrillers.

Knockdown – Dick Francis, 1974 ★★

Putting the Blood in Bloodstock

Dick Francis wrote very well. I feel confident in stating this, in part because I have read some fine Dick Francis novels and in part because he kept me reading this, a novel by no means fine. It is the mark of a superlative novelist to hold a reader’s attention even when firing blanks.

Knockdown begins with exactly that, a knockdown attack on our protagonist while he arranges a horse sale. As this is the livelihood of Jonah Dereham, he is both concerned and confused.

Why would a pair of thugs beat him up over the title to a non-sensational horse? And why would they attack him again when he acquires its replacement? Is it business? Is it personal? In time, Dereham discovers it is a bit of both.

The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers, 1934 ★★★

Ask Not for Whom the Bells Toll...

Classic English murder novels of the early 20^th century are sometimes called “mystery cozies,” conjuring up notions of tea at a warm fireplace, damask upholstery, and a pair of turned-up boots politely protruding from the farthest corner.

I’d like to call The Nine Tailors a “cozy,” in that it is an utterly English novel of strict social conventions and consummate discretion, except I was hardly cozy while reading it.

The problem wasn’t the goriness of the main crime, though a dead man found in someone else’s grave with his hands lopped off and his face bashed in is pretty gory territory, however discretely described. Nor was it the uneasiness of the setting, a small church in the English fenlands peopled by a community with dirty secrets to hide.

Innocent Blood – P. D. James, 1980 ★★★★½

Blood Is Thicker

A departure from P. D. James' famous run of detective novels featuring Adam Dalgliesh, Innocent Blood is a stand-alone mystery less about crime than those who are its victims. It's a satisfying read, well-plotted and suspenseful, that raises unsettling questions about identity and love.