The Best Mystery Books: 10 Classics and Modern Favourites
This is a list of ten of the best mystery books, running from the short story often called the first modern detective tale to a 2020 bestseller. It covers the authors most readers expect, such as Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, alongside some that are easier to miss.
Each pick earns its place on the record. That means sales figures, rankings by bodies such as the Crime Writers' Association, its place in the history of the genre, or a spot on the New York Times bestseller list. The books are ordered by how much interest our readers have shown in them, so the most looked-at titles come first.
We have kept plot details to the set-up. Nobody wants the solution given away in a reading list.
And Then There Were None
Ten people are brought to an isolated island off the coast of Devon, each accused of a past crime, and they start to die one by one in line with an old rhyme. It is the world's best-selling mystery novel, with more than 100 million copies sold by 2007. Christie called it the most difficult of her novels to write and thought it better crafted than anything else she produced. The Crime Writers' Association ranked it nineteenth on its 1990 list of the best crime novels, and in 2015 a global vote named it the World's Favourite Christie.
Death On The Nile
Hercule Poirot is on holiday in Egypt and joins a steamer touring the Nile. On board is the wealthy heiress Linnet Doyle with her new husband Simon, who was once engaged to her former friend Jacqueline de Bellefort. Jacqueline has followed the couple throughout their honeymoon, and the boat carries a long list of other passengers. Christie published it in 1937 through the Collins Crime Club.
The Shadow Of The Wind
In 1940s Barcelona, a bookseller's son named Daniel is taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a secret library of rare and banned titles. He takes home a novel by Julián Carax, then finds that its author has vanished along with almost every copy of his work. Daniel's search for the truth makes this a story within a story. It is the first book in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's Cemetery of Forgotten Books series and is believed to have sold 15 million copies worldwide.
The Thursday Murder Club
Four pensioners at Cooper's Chase, a luxury retirement village in Kent, set out to solve the murder of a property developer. This was the debut novel of the television presenter Richard Osman and a New York Times bestseller. It also opened his Thursday Murder Club series, so there is more to read if it suits you.
The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes
These twelve stories are the earliest Sherlock Holmes short stories, first printed in The Strand Magazine between July 1891 and June 1892. All are narrated by Dr Watson. The collection includes "A Scandal in Bohemia", which introduces Irene Adler, and "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", which Conan Doyle himself named as his favourite Holmes story in 1927. The stories were popular enough to boost The Strand's subscriptions.
The Hound Of The Baskervilles
Holmes and Watson look into the legend of a supernatural hound said to haunt the Baskerville family on Dartmoor. This was the first Holmes story after his apparent death in "The Final Problem", and its success led to the character's revival. A 1999 poll of Sherlockians ranked it the best of the four Holmes novels.
The Woman In White
A young drawing teacher, Walter Hartright, meets a distressed woman dressed all in white on a London road and later learns she has escaped from an asylum. Collins tells the story through several narrators, the way witnesses give evidence in court, an idea drawn from his legal training. It is seen as an early example of detective fiction. In 2003 The Observer placed it at number 23 in its list of the 100 greatest novels.
The Daughter Of Time
Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is stuck in a hospital bed with a broken leg. To pass the time he investigates whether King Richard III really murdered the Princes in the Tower. In 1990 the Crime Writers' Association voted it number one in its Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time. It was the last book Josephine Tey published in her lifetime.
The Moonstone
A diamond taken from India by theft and murder is left to a young woman named Rachel, and it disappears from her room on the night of her birthday. Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard is called in. First serialised in Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round, it is an early modern detective novel that set many of the genre's ground rules.
The Murders In The Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe's 1841 story has been described as the first modern detective story. C. Auguste Dupin takes on the brutal murder of two women in a Paris room locked from the inside, where witnesses heard a voice but cannot agree on its language. Dupin's habits became conventions for later detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot (the clever investigator, his friend as narrator).
If you want to see how the genre grew, read the list backwards, starting with Poe and moving through Collins and Conan Doyle to Christie. Several of these books also start series, so a good first read can lead to plenty more.