On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill
Hill’s larger-than-life creation, Andy Dalziel, plays understudy to location here. A girl disappears, and the panic and suspicion in a small Yorkshire community are beautifully evoked. The flooding of the valley below Beulah Height to create a reservoir covers all traces of the crimes, creating a stunning portrait of a landscape scarred by loss
Green for Danger by Christianna Brand
Criticised for her characters’ cool reactions to the reality of air raids, Brand argued that ‘during the whole of the blitz upon London which I spent in a heavily bombed area…I, too, saw “not a shadow of panic or failure or endurance-at-an-end”. Her tale of murder in a Kent military hospital is a tribute to that courage.
Checkmate to Murder by E.C.R. Lorac
Detective stories flourished in Britain during and after both world wars, but war itself has proved an effective setting for crime fiction. Here, Lorac skillfully turns her familiarity with wartime London into an atmospheric, carefully observed story. The murder of a miser makes cunning use of a Hampstead black-out.
The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne
Milne’s book - a country house, locked room mystery - helped establish the conventions of British detective fiction between the wars. Its immense popularity testified to a reader’s preference for charm over plausibility.
The Dying of the Light by Michael Dibdin
A bleak and ruthless Agatha Christie pastiche, in which the country house becomes a nursing home. At Eventide Lodge, a suspicious death holds far fewer horrors than the living hell of each passing day.
The Lord Have Mercy by Shelley Smith
Notable for its early, fearless depiction of a lesbian couple, the novel explores the frustrations and hatred lying dormant in middle-class village life. Smith takes a world of dinner parties, fetes, and antique shops and gives it a vicious, claustrophobic twist. Its powerful climax has all the terrible inevitability of a Greek tragedy.
The Killings at Badger’s Drift by Caroline Graham
A tranquil English village, the death of a spinster - this could be fifty years earlier were it not for the wry self-awareness and barbed humour that are sometimes lost in the TV world of Midsomer. Dedicated to crime novelist Christianna Brand, Graham’s debut established her as a successor to Brand’s impeccable plotting, sharp observation, and a touch of the macabre.
The Ice House by Minette Walters
Drawing comparisons with Ruth Rendell on publication, Walters’s memorable debut combines a deceptively traditional rural setting with an unflinching exploration of scandal, prejudice, and adultery.
Death at Broadcasting House by Val Gielgud and Holt Marvell
Val Gielgud and BBC colleague, Eric Auschwitz, used their knowledge of the new Broadcasting House to create the perfect setting for an audacious on-air murder. The book and the 1934 film give a fascinating glimpse into the recording techniques of the time and the glamour of Portland Place.
The Port of London Murders by Josephine Bell
Bell was blessed with a gift for atmosphere. The life of the Thames - factories and wharves, derelict barges with strange cargoes, the mean streets off dockland - provides a genuinely original view of London. Bell’s career as a GP gave her insights into social health and inequalities that she highlighted in fiction.
The Spoilt Kill by Mary Kelly
A private agent is hired to investigate the theft of designs from Shentall’s Pottery and diverted by a body in a vat of liquid clay. The wider industrial landscape is beautifully portrayed, but the book’s genius lies in its cumulative detail: the clay-whitened water ‘like milk between the cobbles’; the lack of plastic mugs in Stoke; the cacophony of factory hooters marking lunch across the city.
A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters
Peters deftly populates historical events with characters whose motivations seem plausible today; her impact on the genre was so great that the Crime Writers’ Association named its Historical Dagger prize after her. The character of Brother Cadfael shot to fame on the popularity of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. He stayed there on his own merits, through kindness, wry humour, and an impatience with religious piety.
Venus in Copper by Lindsey Davis
In creating Marcus Didius Falco, Davis gave herself a wonderful window through which to explore multiple aspects of Roman society under Emperor Vespasian. The novel combines historical knowledge with compelling plots, colourful situations, and lively dialogue.
A Place of Execution by Val McDermid
Two stories are seamlessly woven into one unforgettable novel. In 1963, thirteen-year-old Alison Carter disappears from an insular Derbyshire hamlet; 35 years later, a journalist, Alison’s contemporary, attempts to find answers. Setting its fictional story against the reality of the Moors Murders, the book conveys the unique atmosphere of a particular time and place. McDermid’s sleight of hand upends our whole understanding of truth
The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton
Based on Father John O’Connor, a Bradford parish priest, Chesterton’s unlikely hero was a tiny man with a shabby umbrella, an unruly collection of parcels, and ‘a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling’. His insights came from God and a peerless knowledge of the human heart.
The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham
Albert Campion was a modest, unassuming detective; in his debut, he’s a suspect, not the main character. Over four decades, Allingham skilfully developed Campion from ‘a silly ass’ to a serious, mature intelligence veteran, immensely likeable as both.
The Man in the Queue by Gordon Daviot (Josephine Tey)
The first detective novel by the writer better known as Josephine Tey shows all the daring and originality for which she’s admired, especially by other writers. It introduced Alan Grant, one of the earliest credible police inspectors. Tey, however, refused to be constrained by his popularity: he is absent from some of her finest books, and in one even appears on the wrong side of justice.
Speedy Death by Gladys Mitchell
1929 was a vintage year for detective debuts and the most eccentric by far was Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, who would go on to appear in 66 books. A self-proclaimed ‘psychiatric consultant to the Home Office’, Mrs Bradley’s distinctive cackle, unorthodox methods, and memorable appearance delighted her devoted readers.
The Murder at the Vicarage, A Murder is Announced and The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side - all by Agatha Christie
Christie’s disdain for patronising attitudes towards women and the elderly shines through her portrayal of Jane Marple. The Marple books and their St Mary Mead setting are a mirror to social change in twentieth-century England; these three novels move from a traditional village hierarchy to the post-war suspicion of the stranger and eventually to the arrival of supermarkets and housing estates.
Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers
A year after dismissing the ‘love interest’ in crime fiction, Sayers introduced Harriet Vane as a vehicle to marry off her detective Lord Peter Wimsey. Instead, their relationship developed over several books, enriching both the detective and emotional aspects of Sayers’s later work and fulfilling her wish that her characters should grow and change.
From Doon with Death by Ruth Rendell
According to his creator, DCI Reg Wexford was ‘born at the age of 52’ and was ‘a man because like most women I am…still caught up in the web that one writes about men because men are the people and we are the others.’ Amiable and happily married, Wexford is a strong counterpoint to the disturbed and despairing characters who people Rendell’s books.
The Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter
Dexter created Inspector Morse on a rainy holiday in Wales; by the time the series ended 25 years later, he had refashioned the traditional mystery. Morse’s idiosyncrasies are legendary but strip away music, crosswords, beer, and the car, and you’re left with a human mix of bluster, vulnerability, romance, and cynicism. In his superintendent’s words, an ‘extraordinary and exasperating man’.
Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin
In the outline for Rankin’s first novel, John Rebus was killed off - surely a good argument for an author to keep plans flexible. Rebus has developed considerably since his debut. Part of Rankin’s skill as a writer is his ability to reveal, fresh aspects of his character with each new book. Rebus’s readiness to combine bleakness with extraordinary compassion makes him one of the most interesting protagonists in any genre.
Rune by Chirstopher Fowler
‘It came as a shock to me to open my battered copy of Rune and find that the world of Bryant & May was already fully formed in my second novel.’ Arthur Bryant and John May are Golden Age detectives in a modern world. Later, they had their own much-loved, long-running series but made their debut in this standalone about London gripped by an epidemic. Fowler’s premature death last year robbed the genre of one of its most original writers.
Prime Suspect by Lynda La Plante
DI Jane Tennison’s first appearance is perhaps the most modest in any crime novel. She works quietly on a dull VAT fraud case while the murder inquiry goes on around her. This unpromising scene sets up the struggle for recognition that Tennison has with her male colleagues - as integral to the book as the crimes that follow.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Crime novels are not often cited as books that uplift or make a reader smile, but these gentle stories of Precious Ramotswe, founder of Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, strike a chord across the globe. Evil never triumphs in Mma Ramotswe’s world; kindness, generosity of spirit, courtesy, and forgiveness are placed at the centre of life.
The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves
Brought to the screen by Brenda Blethyn, Cleeves’s beloved Vera Stanhope is a Northumberland detective who cares deeply about her work and very little about her appearance. The character was partly inspired by single women whom Cleeves knew growing up in the 1950s, those ‘indomitable women who ran things’ and had real wartime responsibility, choosing a single working life rather than marriage.
Cover Her Face by P.D. James
P.D. James’s most famous detective, Adam Dalgliesh, took his surname from her English teacher at Cambridge High School. A poet whose wife and son died in childbirth, he was given the qualities that James admired most: intelligence, courage, sensitivity, and reticence.
Payment Deferred by C.S. Forester
In debt and despair, bank clerk William Marble poisons his nephew for money and buries him in the back garden. In this claustrophobic portrait of guilt, Marble spends every waking minute in terror of being hanged, living like a ‘cornered rat’ until the law delivers an ironic, brutal twist of fate.
Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles
From its opening sentence, in which the philandering Dr Bickleigh decides to murder his domineering wife, Iles’s novel blasts through the whodunnit format while being very different - a penetrating study of murder, told from the inside out. Hugely influential, the book’s cynical humour, heavy use of irony, and cruel cameo sketches are a delight.
A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell
Rendell brilliantly lays bare her plot on the very first page and develops it with an unrelenting sense of dread rather than clues. A family moves through life oblivious to its fate as Eunice Parchment takes revenge on the written words that alienate her from the world.
Lonely Magdalen by Henry Wade
When sex worker, Bella Knox is found murdered on Hampstead Heath, the press and police discuss the case with all the skewed assumptions of guilt and innocence that are still rife many years later. But Wade’s novel is on the side of the victim: its empathy and compassion transform this into the story of a life that matters.
The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey
Who is the victim here? The blue-eyed teenage girl who arrives home after an unexplained absence, claiming to have been abducted? Or the mother and daughter, accused of beating her with a dog whip and holding her against her will? Against a backdrop of scandal and trial by media, Tey’s masterpiece lays bare our assumptions of class and gender and shows how far the effects of emotional violence can spread.
Garnethill by Denise Mina
Mina has said that she wants her books to replicate the humanising detail in postmortem photographs that she saw while studying forensic science. That unflinching quality, mixed with compassion, makes her writing special. Here, former psychiatric patient Maureen O’Donnell’s experience of sexual abuse gives her a deep empathy with fellow survivors and illuminates that painful struggle for the reader.
A Pin to See the Peep Show by F. Tennyson Jesse
Inspired by the real-life conviction and execution of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters in 1923, Jesse’s haunting masterpiece centres on Julia Almond, whose punishment is vastly out of proportion to her crime. The novel symbolises the class and gender discrimination rife in 1920s Britain. The hours leading up to Julia’s execution, sedated and scarcely human, are amongst the most horrific in all of crime fiction
We, The Accused by Ernest Raymond
The final devastating moments of Raymond’s epic novel are haunting, and the book is said to have contributed to the ultimate demise of capital punishment in Britain. Raymond traces Paul Presset’s murder of his wife, from motive and planning to manhunt, arrest, and trial. The book resists any attempt to portray people as good or evil.
Verdict of Twelve by Raymond Postgate
A woman is on trial for murder but Postgate’s groundbreaking, novel centres on a forensic examination of the jury members and their reactions to the crime. Cynical and dark, the book ruthlessly exposes the prejudice of the British justice system. By including a killer and a religious fanatic on the jury, Postgate asks uncomfortable questions about who has the right to judge.
Reputation For a Song by Edward Grierson
Grierson’s account of murder within an ordinary family has a haunting, melancholy impact that belies its quiet prose. A son kills his father, claiming self-defence, and in the ensuing trial the suspense comes not from the question of his guilt, but whether he will hang. As its title suggests, the novel shows how easily a life can be permanently and unjustly tarnished.
The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger
Few writers have gone further to put themselves in uncomfortable shoes than filmmaker Emeric Pressburger. A Jew who was forced to flee Berlin when Hitler took power, his mother, and several other relatives died in the Holocaust. In this harrowing, fearless novel, he writes from the perspective of a Nazi war criminal, dissecting guilt and paranoia in a way that’s chilling and utterly convincing.
The Players and the Game by Julian Symons
Critic and crime novelist H.R.F. Keating praised Symons’s skill in using the crime novel to show ‘the violence behind bland faces’. In this story of a serial killer couple, readers must identify the man and the woman involved from a host of characters.
Innocent Blood by P.D. James
In the 1960s, P.D. James, alongside Ruth Rendell, transformed the crime novel into a living, breathing reflection of the world, capable of social commentary and deep psychological insight. Innocent Blood is the story of an adopted girl who discovers that she’s the child of a rapist and a murderer and sets out to find her mother. In dealing unflinchingly with a child’s death, it offers a powerful masterclass in the insanity of grief.
The Mermaids Singing by Val McDermid
McDermid’s breakthrough novel was praised for its feminist subversion of the crime genre and introduced Dr Tony Hill. It was written, she says, ‘partly as a reaction against a slew of novels…in which hideous violence was meted out to female victims whose only role…was to be raped, mutilated…and strewn across the landscape…I wanted to do things differently.’
The Dancing Face by Mike Phillips
The Dancing Face combines a fast-paced thriller with ongoing discussions around the restitution of Nigerian artefacts lodged in British institutions and acquired through war or exploitation. Philips’s pioneering fiction frequently addresses social issues and politics, vividly brought to life by engaging characters. This novel was written more than 25 years ago, but its relevance is stronger than ever.
Kif by Josephine Tey
Kif is an orphaned country boy whose poverty on returning from the First World War leads him to a life of crime, with the fatal consequences hinted at by striking cover art. Tey’s first novel, written under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot, is a quietly devastating depiction of the aftermath of war on ordinary people.
The Final Problem by Arthur Conan Doyle
Conan Doyle saw the Reichenbach Falls on a visit to Switzerland, and knew instantly how to get rid of Sherlock Holmes, who ‘takes my mind from better things’. Holmes plunged to his death at the Falls, locked in combat with Moriarty. Grieving his father’s death, Doyle was bewildered by the public mourning for a fictional character, but finally he gave in: Holmes returned in 1901 and eventually retired.
Nineteen Eighty-Three by David Peace
Very few characters are left standing at the end of The Red Riding Quartet (1999 – 2002), Peace’s uncompromising portrayal of a decade of crime and police corruption in Yorkshire. Written with meticulous detail, the Quartet is set against the Ripper’s reign of terror but concerned more with the broader decay and collapse of society, manifest in the Yorkshire landscape and the very language of the people.
Curtain by Agatha Christie
When Christie killed off her detective Hercule Poirot after more than 50 years, his death was front-page news all over the world and spawned many obituaries. She wrote Poirot’s final story, Curtain, during the Blitz and stored it in a bank vault for posthumous publication, but Collins persuaded her to make it the 1975 ‘Christie for Christmas’. Poirot returns to Styles, the country house setting of his first appearance in 1920. His final address to Captain Hastings reads poignantly as Christie’s farewell to her readers; she died four months after the book was published.
The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter
When Dexter announced Morse’s death, a press conference was called, and tissues provided. The character’s fortunes had been transformed by TV adaptations and a wonderful rapport between John Thaw and Kevin Whately as Morse and Lewis; a modern-day Holmes and Watson. Acknowledging the importance of Thaw’s portrayal, Dexter added a clause to his will to prevent other actors from playing him.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
Dickens died when Edwin Drood was unfinished and left no indication of how he would have completed the story, thereby providing the ultimate - unsolvable - narrative twist. Ian Ousby calls this cover ‘the biggest clue of all’ to Dickens’s intentions; it includes several scenes that do not appear in the completed half of the book, prompting much speculation of what was to come.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
In Roger Ackroyd, Christie tore up the rule book and made anything possible. Its breathtaking twist divided readers, labelled ‘a rotten, unfair trick’ or ‘a brilliant psychological tour-de-force’. There’s nothing unfair in the plotting: everything the culprit says is true and the whole solution resides in one, apparently banal, sentence.
The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley
When Joan Bendrix is poisoned by a box of chocolates, the amateur sleuths of the ‘Crimes Circle’ offer six possibilities as to who sent it. The most famous novel by a founder of the Detection Club is perhaps unique in crime fiction for having multiple solutions by different authors. Alternatives to Berkeley’s reveal were published by Christianna Brand in 1979 and by Martin Edwards in 2016
The Hound of Death and Witness for the Prosecution by Agatha Christie
Christie’s play, Witness for the Prosecution, began life as a short story in The Hound of Death. When her theatrical producer suggested she adapt it for the stage, she refused. He persisted, goading her into it by writing a terrible adaptation himself. She eventually researched the Old Bailey and turned the story into a gripping courtroom drama, creating a new twist that quickly became the play’s trademark.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Perhaps the biggest puzzle regarding Rebecca is how it’s avoided any genre categorisation in its 85-year history: it has the heart and soul of a crime novel, a murder mystery like no other. Du Maurier’s handling of suspense is flawless, and the shift in our understanding towards the end of the book is one of the most emotionally credible and deftly handled twists in all of fiction.
An Afternoon to Kill by Shelley Smith
When Lancelot Jones is flown out to India, an incompetent pilot lands him in the desert, where he meets an old woman called Alva Hine. She tells him her life story, a Victorian mystery that has him spellbound, but he - and we - are being deceived. The ending has a rare originality, although some readers might find it as infuriating and contrived as it is ingenious.
The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie
The longest-running stage production in the world started life as a radio play, ‘Three Blind Mice’, written for Queen Mary’s 80th birthday. Set in a snowbound country house, the play’s ending is a real surprise. Perhaps the most notable thing about it is the respect given to the solution: audiences are asked to keep the secret at the end of a performance and, for the most part, they do.
The Man Who Didn’t Fly by Margot Bennet
The premise of Bennett’s novel sounds like a brain teaser: ‘Four men are due to fly to Dublin but only three board the plane. The plane crashes and the wreckage is lost. Which man didn’t fly?’ Pieced together from fragments of conversation and logic, the solution is mathematical in its complexity, but ingenious in its delivery.
The False Inspector Dew by Peter Lovesey
‘Sixty years have passed and no one has explained the mystery of the false Inspector Dew.’ So begins the standalone story widely recognised as Lovesey’s masterpiece. Set on board the Mauretania in 1921 and loosely based on real-life murderer Dr Crippen and the policeman who pursued him. Fiendishly clever, the book is a writer’s favourite. Colin Dexter, HRF Keating, and Ruth Rendell have all defied anyone to see the outcome.
A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine
Writer Julian Symons credited A Fatal Inversion with ‘the most brilliantly ironic ending of any crime story known to me’. The second novel that Ruth Rendell wrote as Barbara Vine opens with the discovery of two bodies in the pet cemetery of a Suffolk country house; rich in intrigue and atmosphere, it culminates in a daring and satisfying twist of fate.
An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears
Set in Oxford in the 1660s, Pears’s epic centres on the suspicious death of a fellow from New College and the young woman accused of his murder. The novel is narrated by four very different witnesses and the facts shift and distort with each new testimony; the final pages shed a new light on everything.
The Office of the Dead by Andrew Taylor
The genius of Taylor’s Roth trilogy (following The Four Last Things and The Judgement of Strangers) is that whichever order you read it in rewards you with a satisfying layering of secrets, gradually unfolding the interwoven histories of two families – and the psychological development of a serial killer. The conclusion is a brilliant ending to a story that spans more than half a century - or is it the beginning?
BOOKS THAT BECAME FILMS
The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes
A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey
The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White
Before the Fact by Francis Iles
The House of Doctor Edwardes by Francis Beeding
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
BOOKS SET IN CAMBRIDGE
Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham
Darkness at Pemberley by T.H. White
The Boat Race Murder by R.E. Swartout
The Cambridge Murders by Dilwyn Rees
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James
The Wyndham Case by Jill Paton Walsh
A Plague on Both Your Houses by Susanna Gregory
Nights in White Satin by Michelle Spring
Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott
Cambridge Blue by Alison Bruce
Lasting Damage by Sophie Hannah
Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by James Runcie
The No. 2 Feline Detective Agency by Mandy Morton
Nine Lessons by Nicola Upson
The Lantern Men by Elly Griffiths
