I started reading detective stories in my teens, and I’ve never quit. They’ve become part of my professional identity. I’ve taught detective (and crime) fiction at various universities in the U.S. and the Middle East. I believe the genre is incredibly rich, allowing the writer to explore anything from contemporary social issues to historical events and from psychological phenomena to philosophical problems. Apart from my academic work, I also write and edit detective/crime stories, and I try to keep up with the stream of new works being published every year. The list here contains some of my all-time favorites, and I hope you will enjoy them as much as I have.
I’ve rarely found myself rooting so much for a detective. The novel chronicles one man’s lonely and obsessive hunt for a child murderer in 1950s Switzerland. This is a thrilling, fast-paced read, and some of the scenes affected me deeply.
Beyond the plot, however, what I find most compelling are the story’s explorations of the nature of evil and the role of chance in human life. Reason is put to a severe test in this story about a world full of darkness and chaos.
I came away feeling smarter; I was also entertained. This is an endlessly clever, massively erudite historical detective novel. It carries its learning so lightly that one slips effortlessly into the world of a fourteenth-century Italian abbey, where strange murders are occurring, and the hunt is on for a long-lost manuscript from ancient antiquity.
The novel is full of literary in-jokes – the detective is called William of Baskerville – and just trying to pick up on all those is a delight. The plot grabs one, and the finale is unforgettable.
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective.
William collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.
I love a good conspiracy story, and this is one of the whackiest, most original ever. Steeped in 1960s culture and packed with literary and pop-cultural references (and itself referenced by William Gibson, Star Trek, and Radiohead, amongst many others), the story follows Oedipa Maas as she tries to unravel a nefarious plot that spans the centuries.
Every time I reread the novel, I discover something new, and I’m sure I still don’t get even half of the allusions. The book is zany and funny, but I can’t help wondering whether this conspiracy might not have some basis in fact….
By far the shortest of Pynchon's great, dazzling novels - and one of the best.
Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting The Crying of Lot 49.
This was difficult to do well, but Ackroyd makes it work–and he makes it look easy: One half of the story is told in a very idiosyncratic version of early eighteenth-century English (the other half in contemporary English). The level of sheer craftsmanship is impressive.
The story gripped me: a serial killer mystery with touches of the occult and supernatural. London is a haunted place in this story, but not only the victims of the past but also the killers are still with us today. We come to understand that our entire world is built on the flawed achievements of the past.
'There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe'
So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and the man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind . . .…
It might not impress all the cocktail party goers, though it ought to! Brilliantly plotted, unforgettable characters, terse compelling prose, and probably the best MacGuffin of all time. I must have read this novel half a dozen times, and each time, I come away more in awe of Hammett’s flawless craftsmanship.
The book also knows its own pedigree. It is a story about a cynical modern knight searching for a medieval artifact. The world he is moving through, however, is a fallen one, and so the treasure is flawed. The damsel in distress is also not quite the maiden she makes herself out to be.
One of the greatest crime novels of the 20th century.
'His name remains one of the most important and recognisable in the crime fiction genre. Hammett set the standard for much of the work that would follow' Independent
Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a…
The book features twelve Sherlock Holmes stories, like the original collections by Arthur Conan Doyle. This time, the stories are by twelve different writers, each of them highly accomplished in the realm of Holmes's pastiche stories.
Together, these stories cover Holmes’s entire career, from his early Baker Street days to his retirement on the South Downs and even somewhat beyond–a complete life of the great detective. The stories show Holmes on the hunt for a priceless diamond, his last case in Baker Street, Holmes solving the mystery of the Yeti, and a mystery revolving around the dark fate of a group of World War I veterans, among many others.
I've always loved fiction, fantasy, and adventure stories. Growing up in the Star Wars generation, I was seven whenA New Hope was released at the theaters. Living in the hollows of West Virginia there weren’t libraries close by, and movies were a great, though seldom, treat. Suggestive material and cursing was not something that we saw in books or movies growing up in a more simple period of time. I still thoroughly enjoy many well-written, clean, books or shows. As an active member of the body of Christ, I now serve with my writing, and hope that kids of all ages can enjoy epic fantasy and adventure books from a clean and wholesome perspective.
Finding Family, Discovery, Destiny. This is what nineteen-year-old Bain Brinley is searching for.
In his homeland, far in the mountains, he stepped into what he could only describe as a time-portal and landed in a strange land known as Egypt. Then he falls through another portal during a storm, only to end up in another world known as Harilhia. Here, he soon discovers a creature he knew from home. He was back, but it wasn't Zanchier.
Can he find his family, and figure out what the Creator wanted him to do with time-travel?
Stormwalker Series Connections In Time Bain's Story Book 1
Nineteen-year-old Bain Brinley has just inadvertently stepped into a time portal and was deposited into a world like none he had ever seen before. He turned to go back through the portal and back to Zanchier to find his family, only to find the portal gone. Now, Bain must face this strange, new, world without anyone else on whom he can depend.
As he gazes out over the hot, dry, desert climate at the large pyramid shaped structures, he is unsure where to go. He is soon thrust into a strange,…
