The Best Crime Books: 14 Classics of the Genre, From Chandler to Archer
Crime fiction covers a lot of ground. Hardboiled private eyes, psychological thrillers, courtroom revenge plots and Hollywood capers all sit under the same heading. This guide gathers fourteen of the best crime books and explains what each one actually is, so you can pick the right one rather than guess from a cover.
The order comes from what readers of this shop look at most, with the most viewed titles first. The selections themselves rest on firmer ground: Edgar Awards, places on the Modern Library 100 and Time's best novels lists, and the simple fact that several of these books invented the conventions the rest of the genre still uses.
The Big Sleep
Chandler's 1939 debut introduced Philip Marlowe, the heavy-drinking Los Angeles private investigator hired by the elderly General Sternwood to deal with a blackmailer. The plot is famously tangled, full of double-crosses and buried secrets, and unusually for a detective novel the central mystery is never fully resolved. The title is a euphemism for death. It was voted 96th in Le Monde's "100 Books of the Century" and included in Time magazine's list of the 100 best novels, and it has been filmed twice, in 1946 and 1978.
The Long Goodbye
Marlowe's sixth outing, published in 1953, begins with a friendship struck up with a scarred drunk named Terry Lennox and turns into something much darker when Lennox's wife is found dead. Chandler used the hardboiled form here as a vehicle for social criticism and drew on his own life for parts of it. He called it "my best book", and it won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1955. Robert Altman's 1973 film version moved the story to 1970s Los Angeles with Elliott Gould as Marlowe.
Devil in a Blue Dress
Walter Mosley's first published book, this 1990 novel is set in the Watts area of Los Angeles in 1948. Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins has lost his job at an aviation plant and cannot pay his mortgage, so he takes a stranger's money to find a missing white woman named Daphne Monet. The job turns into murder, blackmail and a hard education in how the LAPD treats a Black man with questions. It is the book that turns Easy from a day labourer into a detective.
The Maltese Falcon
Hammett's novel was serialised in the pulp magazine Black Mask from September 1929 and published as a book the following year. San Francisco detective Sam Spade loses his partner on a simple-sounding tailing job and finds himself among liars all chasing a jewel-encrusted black falcon statuette. Hammett tells it entirely from the outside, never once entering a character's thoughts, so you judge everyone by what they say and do. It is a founding text of the hardboiled genre and has been filmed several times.
Brighton Rock
It works as a crime story and as a study of morality, guilt and the possibility of redemption. Its afterlife has been unusually long: a stage adaptation in 1943, films in 1948 and 2010, and a stage musical in 2004 with music by John Barry.
Get Shorty
Elmore Leonard's 1990 novel follows Chili Palmer, a Miami loan shark who chases a debt to Las Vegas and then to Los Angeles, where he discovers he likes the movie business rather more than collecting money. The comedy comes from how little difference there turns out to be between shaking someone down and producing a film. It became the 1995 film with the same name and a television series in 2017.
Strangers on a Train
Patricia Highsmith's novel is the source of Alfred Hitchcock's film and of Craig Warner's stage adaptation. It works the territory Highsmith made her own: guilt, obsession and the slow collapse of an ordinary man's moral footing. A good starting point if you want psychological crime rather than detection.
The Big Nowhere
The second book in James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet, published in 1988 and set in Los Angeles at the turn of the 1950s. Three men circle the same case: a deputy sheriff investigating a string of brutal sex murders, a disgraced ex-cop working for Howard Hughes and the gangster Mickey Cohen, and an LAPD lieutenant trying to stay decent. All three end up attached to a task force investigating communism in Hollywood, with the Sleepy Lagoon case and the Zoot Suit Riots in the recent past. It is bleak, dense and tightly wound into real history.
Double Indemnity
James M. Cain's story ran as an eight-part serial in Liberty magazine in 1936. An insurance salesman is drawn in by a client's wife and helps her kill her husband in a way that triggers the policy's double indemnity clause, doubling the payout. The 1944 film, directed by Billy Wilder with a screenplay he wrote with Raymond Chandler, was nominated for seven Academy Awards and is often named as the film that set the standard for noir.
A Dark-Adapted Eye
Ruth Rendell published this 1986 psychological thriller under her Barbara Vine pen name, and it won the American Edgar Award. Faith Severn, prompted by a true-crime writer, pieces together her memories of her aunt Vera Hillyard, a prim and snobbish woman whose devotion to her younger sister and to her second son curdles into something terrible. Much of it takes place during the Second World War. The BBC adapted it as a television film in 1994.
Red Harvest
Hammett's 1929 novel sends the Continental Op to a Montana mining town called Personville, known locally as Poisonville, where gangs have taken over after a labour dispute. Rather than solve one murder and leave, the Op sets the factions against each other and watches the body count climb. Hammett drew on his own years as a Pinkerton operative, and part of the plot was inspired by the 1920 Anaconda Road massacre in Butte. Time included it in its 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005, crediting Hammett with creating the prototype for every hardboiled sleuth to follow.
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
James Hadley Chase's 1939 novel was both a critical and commercial success and a scandal, thanks to its explicit sex and violence. A kidnapping goes wrong, a wealthy young woman falls into the hands of a sadistic gang leader, and a private investigator is hired to get her back. It was hugely popular with British servicemen during the war, became a stage play in 1942 and a British film in 1948, and got a sequel in 1948 with The Flesh of the Orchid.
Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less
Jeffrey Archer's first novel, published in 1976 and said to have been inspired by his own brush with bankruptcy. Four men, an Oxford professor, a Harley Street doctor, a French art dealer and the heir to an earldom, are wiped out by a bogus North Sea oil company. With no legal recourse, they set out to take the money back by exploiting the swindler's vanities, down to the last penny of what they lost.
A Prisoner Of Birth
Published in 2008, this is Archer's contemporary retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. Danny Cartwright is framed for a murder outside a London pub by a barrister and his friends, sentenced to 22 years in Belmarsh, and finds a way back out under another man's name to clear himself and settle accounts. The novel returned Archer to the top of the fiction bestseller list for the first time in a decade.
Between these fourteen you have the origins of the hardboiled novel, several Edgar winners, and a few books that changed how crime fiction is written. Start with whichever premise sounds most like your kind of trouble.