Crime worth solving twice

TL

The Long Goodbye

Raymond Chandler

Chandler’s most personal book, about a friendship rather than a case. Slower than The Big Sleep, and it earns the slower pace.

TT

The Talented Mr Ripley

Patricia Highsmith

A book that makes you complicit within fifty pages and then keeps you there. Highsmith is the least sentimental crime writer there has ever been.

TD

The Daughter of Time

Josephine Tey

A detective investigates a five-hundred-year-old case from a hospital bed, which sounds dull and turns out to be one of the best arguments for historical doubt ever written.

TN

The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco

A monastery murder mystery that is also a book about semiotics, and the mystery is the part that keeps it readable. Demanding and it rewards the effort.

TN

The Nine Tailors

Dorothy L. Sayers

Campanology, a flooded village and a body with no name. Sayers treats the reader as an adult, including about the church bell mathematics.

GP

Gorky Park

Martin Cruz Smith

A Moscow murder investigation where the obstruction is the state rather than a suspect, and the atmosphere is the best thing in it.

SS

Smilla’s Sense of Snow

Peter Høeg

A Greenlander’s knowledge of snow is the clue nobody else can read, which makes the expertise the plot rather than a decoration.

TG

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson

The first half is a corporate investigation and the second half is something else entirely. Popular for the right reasons, and rougher than the films suggest.

TY

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Michael Chabon

An alternate-history Alaska where the murder case is the least interesting thing, deliberately. Chabon is having enormous fun with the language.

TC

The Chalk Man

C. J. Tudor

A childhood crime revisited in middle age, which is a well-worn frame, and the details are what make it work rather than the shape.

TS

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Stuart Turton

A country-house murder told through eight hosts and repeating days, which is a structural trick that never becomes a gimmick. The puzzle is genuinely fair.

TM

The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett

Nobody is trustworthy and the object everybody kills for is worthless. The book that turned detective fiction from a puzzle into a mood.

TE

The Eight

Katherine Neville

A chess set, two timelines and a puzzle that spans both. Overstuffed in the best way, and better than it has any right to be.

TH

The Hollow Man

John Dickson Carr

A locked-room mystery that includes a lecture on how to write locked-room mysteries, and the lecture is the best chapter. For readers who like the machinery visible.

TA

The Alienist

Caleb Carr

New York in 1896, and the novelty is that the investigators are inventing the method as they go. The period detail is load-bearing.

TS

The Snowman

Jo Nesbø

The middle of a series and still the place most people start, because the plotting is tighter than the earlier books and the cold is the atmosphere.

IT

In the Woods

Tana French

The narrator is unreliable in a way that is fair to the reader and still manages to hide the thing in plain sight. The ending is deliberately unsatisfying, and correct.