100 Must-Read Crime Novels

Bloomsbury Good Reading Guides

by Nick Rennison, Nick Rennison

100 Must-Read Crime Novels

Want to become a crime novel buff, or expand your reading in your favorite genre? This is a good place to start! From the publishers of the popular Good Reading, this book contains a rich selection of some of the best crime novels ever published.

Genres: Nonfiction, Books About Books, Mystery, Crime, Writing, Reference

188 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published September 29, 2006

About the author

Nick Rennison is a writer, editor and bookseller. His books include Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorised Biography, Robin Hood: Myth, History, Culture, The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide and 100 Must-Read Historical Novels. He is a regular reviewer of historical fiction for both The Sunday Times and BBC History Magazine.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to say I often have conflicting feelings about these types of books - on the one hand they can give an intriguing and tantalising look in to authors and their works without having the run the risk of being stuck with a book I would not like or worse - not even read!
However the side is that the author could give skewed and biased opinions that taint a book and its author so that I decided it is not for me and I want nothing more to do with it. I guess a case of either tantalising hints or painful oversharing.
However I have to say after reading a number of these little books I find they have hit the right mix (for me) of detail and intrigue so much so that I have gone out and searched for me as for once there is a fun mix of recognisable titles and total unknows - so to be honest this is a book I will return to time and time again to dig in to this author and that.
What is more is that there are cross references and further reading suggestions so that there are more titles than simply those held in these pages.

[Ian Laird · Rating 3 out of 5]

A useful selection drawn predominantly from British and American authors, almost all from the twentieth century, while giving due credit to the pioneers Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Emile Gaboriau.

There are many crime writers we would expect to find: Patricia Highsmith, Eric Ambler, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, PD James, Ian Rankin and Ruth Rendell, among others. Many less well known authors are profiled like Walter Mosely (Devil in a Blue Dress) or Charles Williams who wrote Dead Calm Paperback – International Edition, November 25, 2014, later made into a film with Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman.

There was a time when I devoured Carl Hiaasen, probably the funniest crime writer, the investigative journalist turned novelist of outrageously gory stories of corruption and crime in Florida’s tourist industry, the thriving plastic surgery game and bass fishing, of all things. Hugely entertaining.

It’s good to see people like Cyril Hare, one of the rare judges who, having turned their hand to fiction can actually write, viz; An English Murder, Tragedy at Law.

There is one inevitability, which is of course that there are no Australian crime writers among the hundred novelists, because we don’t have crime here, or corruption, or law breakers. There is a New Zealander, Ngaio Marsh and a Swede, Henning Mankel, but otherwise we get mainly Americans and Brits.

Some caution is necessary, so it might be best to confirm a choice from other references. I found a copy of Body Language by James W Hall, which I passed on to a close friend on the basis of Shephard and Rennison’s regard for Hall’s work, but the authors make no mention of the misogyny which turned my friend off the book.

[Jasmine · Rating 3 out of 5]

note to self:

1The Tiger in the Smoke
2A Coffin for Dimitrios
3The Deadly Percheron
4Trent's Last Case
5Double Indemnity
6The Hollow Man & The House in Gallows Lane
7Laura
8The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
9Tell No One
10Postmortem
11The Moving Toyshop
12The Dead of Jericho
13Dead Lagoon
14The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
15The Black Dahlia
16Downriver
17Flinch: A Novel
18Under Cover of Daylight
19Fadeout
20When the Wind Blows
21Red Dragon
22The Friends of Eddie Coyle
23Dialogues of the Dead
24A Thief of Time
25Four Corners of Night
26The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
27Malice Aforethought
28Hamlet, Revenge!
29A Taste For Death
30Murder On The Yellow Brick Road (Toby Peters Mysteries
31Mystic River
32The Mystery of the Yellow Room
33The Face on the Cutting-room Floor
34The Deep Blue Good-by
35Sidetracked
36Off with His Head/Singing in the Shrouds/False Scent
37Beast In View
38Come Away, Death
39Murder In The Central Committee
40Crocodile on the Sandbank
41One Corpse Too Many
42Tales of Mystery and Imagination
43Black and Blue
44The Devil's Home on Leave
45An Unkindness of Ravens
46In A Dry Season
47Roman Blood
48Maigret Sets A Trap
49The League of Frightened Men
50A Three Pipe Problem
51The Franchise Affair
52The Fools in Town Are on Our Side
53The Killer Inside Me
54A Fatal Inversion
55The Ice House
56The Choirboys
57Dead Calm
58Under the Bright Lights
59The Bride Wore Black

for people who aren't me, 2 books I have read were listed. One I liked one I didn't. based on descriptions I decided 39 did not appeal to mean many by very famous writers. don't you want to buy the book and find out who. there are also cool further reading suggestions for each title and thematic lists.

[Avesta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Decent quick read, love the special sections where there's a list of books for a particular topic you might like (like Oxbridge killers or Medieval crime novels).

Some of the books Richard recommends are quite poorly rated and/or unheard of on goodreads though, which conflicts with his claims that they're must-reads...