I came to writing crime late after reading a P.D. James novel on my honeymoon. Previously a travel and ghostwriter, I became fascinated by the challenge of creating a whodunnit plot that fools the reader while simultaneously playing fair by giving them plenty of juicy clues. Agatha Christie said you should get to the end of your book and then choose the least likely person as the murderer. Quite often, I don’t know who the killer is myself until the end. If I’m kept guessing, hopefully my readers are too. I love the fact that whodunnits are a way of writing about all sorts of worlds within a compelling structure.
This was the book that turned me on to crime fiction, a genre I had always previously spurned. Why should anyone want to read about crime, I’d thought. Isn’t there enough of it in real life anyway?
Then, on my honeymoon in St Lucia, I was staying with my new wife in a magical villa full of books I’d never read. I picked this one up because it was about a publishing house, which reminded me of several I knew as an author. Right from the off, I was drawn in by James’s superb characters and wonderful descriptions. Then the plot kicked in, and I was hooked. When I’d finished it, I moved on to another of her books and was soon reading crime voraciously.
The Peverell Press, a two-hundred-year-old publishing firm housed in a dramatic mock-Venetian palace on the Thames, is certainly ripe for change. But the proposals of its ruthlessly ambitious new managing director, Gerard Etienne, have made him dangerous enemies - a discarded mistress, a neglected and humiliated author, and rebellious colleagues and staff. When Gerard's body is discovered bizarrely desecrated, there is no shortage of suspects and Adam Dalgliesh and his team are confronted with a puzzle of extraordinary complexity and a murderer who is prepared to strike…
Actually, I tell a lie. I had read crime before my honeymoon, but only Agatha Christie, whose whodunnits always feature murders that are tastefully described and over in a couple of lines.
With Christie, it’s all about the puzzle, and boy, is she good at that. Her characters are often a bit two-dimensional, but you forgive that for the sake of her plots, which always race along and convince, however unlikely in real life.
This is one of her most famous ones, and rightly so. No spoilers here, but if you read this as I did as a teenager (recommended by my father) you are in for a grand surprise. Hopefully.
The classic "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", finally at a fair price!The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in June 1926 in the United Kingdom. It is the third novel to feature Hercule Poirot as the lead detective.
In 2013, the British Crime Writers' Association voted it the best crime novel ever.
Once I got into reading crime properly, I soon found my favourite period: the so-called "Golden Age" of the 1920s and 30s, where the writing was all about a clever plot and less about nasty descriptions of murder and death.
This book was written bang in the middle of this period. Though I personally am not the hugest fan of Sayers' rather smug and entitled detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, I love this book for its supremely clever plot, with clues concealed in the most unlikely places.
It’s also a fun setting among a bunch of artists in Galloway, Scotland. One painter, a quarrelsome drunkard, is murdered. Six others are suspected. You will be puzzling over paint colours and train timetables to work out the killer.
The body was on the pointed rocks alongside the stream. The artist might have fallen from the cliff where he was painting, but there are too many suspicious elements -- particularly the medical evidence that proves he'd been dead nearly half a day, though eyewitnesses had seen him alive a scant hour earlier. And then there are the six prime suspects -- all of them artists, all of whom wished him dead. Five are red herrings, but one has created a masterpiece of murder that baffles everyone, including Lord Peter Wimsey.
This book was published in 1946, at the end of the 2nd World War, by a writer who had been a model, a dancer, a shop assistant, and a governess, as well as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in a rural hospital, which is where this wartime story is set.
For me, it’s the ultimate "closed circle" whodunnit, where an ever-decreasing group of suspects is trapped together, in this case surrounded by wounded and dying soldiers. It’s brilliantly claustrophobic, and you know it has to be one of the main characters, however unlikely that seems. The solution and the perpetrator are in plain sight. But I didn’t get it till the end.
This Golden Age masterclass of red herrings and tricky twists, first published in 1944, features a tense and claustrophobic investigation with a close-knit cast of suspects.
"You have to reach for the greatest of the Great Names (Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen) to find Christianna Brand's rivals in the subtleties of the trade."
—Anthony Boucher in The New York Times
It is 1942, and struggling up the hill to the new Kent military hospital Heron's Park, postman Joseph Higgins is soon to deliver seven letters of acceptance for roles at the infirmary. He has no idea that the…
This book is not strictly a whodunnit, as Highsmith follows the murderer closely, and we see not only the murder but experience all its ghastly ramifications.
This was her first novel, and it set the template for the rest of her oeuvre, in which a relatively ordinary person is dragged into a horrific situation by a chance meeting with a personable weirdo. It could have been you on that train; that’s the shocking thing. And soon our hero is caught in a trap from which it seems there is to be no escape.
This is a gripping read and will set you up, if you’re compulsive like me, to read all her other books, which, though often quite dark, always have the most compelling plots.
The classic thriller behind the Hitchcock film, and Highsmith's first novel - soon to be remade by David Fincher, director of Gone Girl, with a screenplay by Gillian Flynn.
By the bestselling author of The Talented Mr Ripley and Carol
The psychologists would call it folie a deux . . .
'Bruno slammed his palms together. "Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on a train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?'''
From this moment, almost against his conscious will, Guy Haines is trapped in a…
This is a classic whodunnit set at a literary festival in rural England. In high summer, writers, critics, and readers have gathered in the small town of Mold-on-Wold. But the mellow party atmosphere is soon changed by the shocking murder of famous critic Bryce Peabody.
Staying in the same hotel, minor crime writer Francis Meadowes finds himself dragged into the action. Who has killed Bryce? Is it one of the many writers he has insulted over the years or someone from his dubious private life? When a second murder of a personable young female gossip columnist follows the first, Francis realises he has no alternative but to try and solve the case.
This book is set in Montauk, under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land. Everyone in town has a stake in the outcome, among them Julienne, an environmentalist and painter fighting to save the landscape that inspires her art; Theresa, a bartender whose trailer park home is jeopardized by coastal erosion; and Molly and Billy, who are struggling to hold onto their property against pressure to sell. When Clancy…
The Stark Beauty of Last Things is set in Montauk, the far reaches of the famed Hamptons, an area under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk's last parcel of undeveloped land.
Everyone in town has a stake in the outcome, among them Julienne, an environmentalist and painter fighting to save the landscape that inspires her art; Theresa, a bartender whose trailer park home is jeopardized by coastal erosion; and Molly and Billy, who…
