The 20 best crime novels of all time

Are any crime books better than these? The 20 best, from
Rebecca to In Cold Blood
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Best crime novels of all time (clockwise from top left): Misery by Stephen King; Kate
Summerscale; Edgar Allan Poe; Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Photo: Hodder;
Rii Schroer; AP; DC Comics

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11:00AM BST 05 May 2014
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The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins (1859)
Women can resist a mans love, a mans fame, a mans personal appearance, and a mans
money, but they cannot resist a mans tongue when he knows how to talk to them, wrote Collins
in the first great Victorian thriller.

Buy The Women in White from the Telegraph Bookshop

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Strangers on a Train
Patricia Highsmith (1950)
The perfect murder is surely the one a sane person has no motive to commit. Thats the premise
of this tense and morally disturbing noir masterpiece in which two men become what the other
had not chosen to be, the cast-off self.

Buy Strangers on a train from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Daughter of Time
Josephine Tey (1951)
Unusually topical with the rediscovery of Richard IIIs bones, Josephine Teys novel starts with a
police inspector bored in hospital re-imagining the last Yorkist king, trying to work out whether
he killed the princes in the Tower or not. The conclusion remains controversial, in some parts.

Buy The Daughter of Time from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle (1892-1927)
The drug-addicted, violin-playing ex-prize fighter is the only mystery that never gets solved in
these original, deliciously engineered and atmospheric detective stories set in that great
cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

Buy The Complete Sherlock Holmes from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Agatha Christie (1926)

Slippery red herrings meet smug little grey cells in this ingenious, rule-breaking country house
murder mystery. Christies masterpiece was inspired by her brother-in-law, who suggested that
the ideal fictional criminal would be a Dr Watson character.

Buy The Murder of Roger Ackroyd from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Madman of Bergerac
Georges Simenon (1932)
Literatures most dogged detective, Commissaire Maigret, is en route to a restful rural weekend
when the peculiar behaviour of a fellow train passenger arouses his curiosity and leads him to a
quaint French country village terrorised by a homicidal maniac.

Buy The Madman of Bergerac from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Nine Tailors
Dorothy L Sayers (1934)
With a flawless English and dry humour that helps make her the most literary of the Golden Age
mystery writers, Sayers ninth novel featuring the crime-solving toff Lord Peter Wimsey is her
most ingenious.

Buy The Nine Tailors from the Telegraph Bookshop

Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier (1938)
A childlike young woman with lank hair marries a mysterious and dominating older man and
becomes dangerously obsessed with his charismatic but deceased first wife. Psychologically
acute, the novel was described by Germaine Greer as a superior example of deeply encoded
female pornography.

Buy Rebecca from the Telegraph Bookshop

Miss Smillas Feeling for Snow
Peter Heg (1992)
At the vanguard of what has since become a Scandinavian crime tsunami, Hegs unusual and
gripping novel follows Miss Smillas investigation into whether a boy was pushed or fell from a
roof in Copenhagen. The clues take her to Greenland via what must be one of the most peculiar
sex scenes in detective history.

Buy Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow from the Telegraph Bookshop

In Cold Blood
Truman Capote (1966)
Seven years after publishing Breakfast at Tiffanys, Capote published this sensational nonfiction novel about the senseless and brutal murder of a Kansas farmer, his wife and two of their
children. Based on interviews with the appalled community and the killers, the book reinvented
reportage.

Buy In Cold Blood from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco (1980)
Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told,
writes the Italian philosopher in his postmodernist debut novel about murder in a 14th-century
monastery. It is the scholarly readers answer to The Da Vinci Code.

Buy The Name of the Rose from the Telegraph Bookshop

The New York Trilogy
Paul Auster (1985-86)
Sly postmodernist sleuthing in this profound, literary quest that sends its author on a search for
the meaning of self and the origins of language. Every life is inexplicable, writes the author,
no matter how many facts are told.

Buy The New York Trilogy from the Telegraph Bookshop

Misery
Stephen King (1987)
Inspired by Kings resentment of readers who wanted him shackled to the horror genre, this
bloodcurdling thriller sees novelist Paul Sheldon imprisoned and tortured by his Number One
Fan. The real fear though is that of every novelist: the blank, bloodless page.

Buy Misery from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler (1939)
The cool master of hardboiled crime fiction sends PI Philip Marlowe into a murky web of
murder, blackmail and pornography, while under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed,
almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.

Buy The Big Sleep from the Telegraph Bookshop

LA Confidential

James Ellroy (1990)

The sprawling and violent third novel in the self-proclaimed Mad Dog of American crime
fictions thrilling, voyeuristic LA quartet sees three cops with varying degrees of attachment to
justice and the law sucked down a drain of astounding audacious perversion.

Buy LA Confidential from the Telegraph Bookshop

Fatherland
Robert Harris (1992)
In this outstanding example of speculative fiction, Harris imagines that Hitler won the Second
World War and, by the 1960s, Britain is a client state ruled by King Edward VIII and Queen
Wallis. Meanwhile, a detective in Berlin examines a corpse that stinks of conspiracy, but that is
only the beginning of the truths waiting to be unearthed.

Buy Fatherland from the Telegraph Bookshop

True History of the Kelly Gang
Peter Carey (2000)
The bushranger turned bank robber gets a voice like a steel nibbed kookaburra on the fences in
the morning sun in Careys Booker Prize-winning novel. Never flinching from the extreme
violence, Carey gives a rich emotional life to a national legend.

Buy True History of the Kelly Gang from the Telegraph Bookshop
Fingersmith
Sarah Waters (2002)
Updating the decadent thrills of the Victorian melodrama for the 21st century, Waters daringly
plotted, erotically charged and exquisitely detailed novel is as sly as its heroine.

Buy Fingersmith from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
Kate Summerscale (2009)
In 1860, the body of three-year-old Saville Kent was thrust into the servants lavatory of his
fathers country house. His throat had been slashed. In this insightful reconstruction which reads
like a crime novel, Summerscale turns the spotlight on the moral hypocrisy surrounding the case.

Buy The Suspicions of Mr Whicher from the Telegraph Bookshop

Get Shorty

Elmore Leonard (1990)

A loan shark attempts to make it big in Hollywood in this witty thriller loaded with Leonards
trademark whip-smart dialogue. Martin Amis once said his prose makes Raymond Chandler
look clumsy.

Buy Get Shorty from the Telegraph Bookshop

THE CONTENDERS
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Edgar Allan Poe (1852)

Buy Tales of Mystery and Imagination from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Innocence of Father Brown
G K Chesterton (1911)

Buy The Innocence of Father Brown from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Thin Man

Dashiell Hammett (1934)

Buy The Thin Man from the Telegraph Bookshop

True Grit
Charles Portis (1968)

Buy True Grit from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Hollow Man
John Dickson Carr (1935)

Buy The Hollow Man from the Telegraph Bookshop

1974
David Peace (1999)

Buy 1974 from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Godfather
Mario Puzo (1969)

Buy The Godfather from the Telegraph Bookshop

Watchmen
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1987)

Buy Watchmen from the Telegraph Bookshop

A Dark-Adapted Eye
Barbara Vine (1986)

Buy A Dark-Adapted Eye from the Telegraph Bookshop

Devices and Desires
P D James (1989)

Buy Devices and Desires from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Fifth Woman
Henning Mankell (1996)

Buy Fifth Woman from the Telegraph Bookshop

My Name is Red
Orhan Pamuk (1998)

Buy My Name is Red from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Remorseful Day
Colin Dexter (1999)

Buy The Remorseful Day from the Telegraph Bookshop

The Girl Who Played with Fire
Stieg Larsson (2006)

Buy The Girl Who Played with Fire from the Telegraph Bookshop
The Journalist and the Murderer
Janet Malcolm (1990)