The best books that combine mystery and suspense into something magical and inspiring

Chandler’s novel, first published in 1939, is a touchstone for anyone writing detective fiction.

Never mind that private detective Philip Marlowe never actually solves anything.

In addition to the famously unsolved murder that Chandler brushed off when told about it, there are plot holes you could drive a Buick Roadmaster through, and prose occasionally edged in purple. Never mind its shortcomings, The Big Sleep overall remains intoxicatingly hard-boiled, a much-imitated classic of the genre.

I have gone back to it many times since I first read it, seeing its flaws but loving its tough-as-nails sensibility. It played an important part in setting me on the road to writing not only the Priscilla Tempest novels but also the Sanibel Sunset Detective mysteries.

Like everyone else who writes this stuff, I owe Chandler a lot.

Dr. No was the sixth James Bond novel Fleming wrote but it was the first one I was finally able to read in paperback when I was about twelve years old.

It transfixed me. I had never read anything quite like it, transporting a boy trapped in small-town Ontario into a wider world of sophistication, sex, and violence.

I devoured the other Bond adventures as fast as I could get my hands on them. If any books made me hunger for faraway glamorous places, it was the Bond novels.

If you can’t imagine the influence Fleming’s worldly writing had on me, you have only to read one of the Priscilla Tempest mysteries.

When Prudence Emery and I set out to collaborate on our first mystery novel, we searched around for inspiration.

I found it rereading Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe. Published in 1976, it cleverly dealt with food and the murder of—you guessed it—Europe’s great chefs. But what most appealed to me was its entertaining mix of humor, sex, and suspense.

The perfect recipe, Prudence and I decided, for our mysteries—with a little Charade and To Catch a Thief thrown in for good measure. 

Le Carré’s third novel was a huge bestseller and forever influenced anyone setting out to write novels of espionage and suspense.

Me included. I took particular pleasure in Le Carré over the long years, returning continually to an author I started with as a child and continued to read as the two of us aged.

Sometimes he was brilliant (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honorable Schoolboy) and occasionally he was overblown (The Constant Gardener). But no matter what he wrote, I was always his faithful follower.

When he died in 2020 at the age of 89, I felt I had lost a lifelong literary pal.

He provided me with a trenchant piece of storytelling advice that I have used many times: A cat on a mat is not a story. But a cat on a dog’s mat, that is the beginning of a story.

Torn between the Hardy Boys novels and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer mysteries, I’ve reluctantly gone with the Hardy Boys.

Both authors (although there were many pseudonymous writers of the Hardy Boys series) taught a fledging writer invaluable lessons about keeping the story moving forward while leaving the reader hanging from the edge of a cliff at the end of each chapter.

What I adored about Joe and Frank Hardy was the freedom they had as teenagers. They never seemed to have to go to high school, they drove their own car, they were never short of money, and they solved mysteries that their detective father never could.

My kind of guys!