Reading list
The best classic detective novels and stories
The detective story has an exact birthday: April 1841, when Poe published The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Within a century it had the locked room, the gentleman thief, the country-house murder and the private eye with a hangover, and almost all of those first books are free.
18 books, all free to read
This list ranks the ones still worth reading for the mystery, not only for their place in history. Holmes leads because the short stories are the best way in.
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1. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Twelve cases, each the length of a commute. A Scandal in Bohemia and The Speckled Band are as good as the genre gets.
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2. The Hound of the Baskervilles
by Arthur Conan Doyle
A curse, a moor and a giant hound. The Holmes novel that reads like a gothic horror and plays fair with the clues.
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3. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
by Agatha Christie
Christie's first book and Poirot's first case, written on a dare from her sister. A country house, a poisoning and a lot of little grey cells.
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4. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
by Agatha Christie
The one with the ending people still argue about. Do not let anyone tell you anything before you read it.
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5. The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
A diamond goes missing from a country house, told by the people who were there. T. S. Eliot called it the first and the best of modern English detective novels.
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6. Short Fiction with The Murders in the Rue Morgue
by Edgar Allan Poe
Where it starts: Dupin, the narrator who admires him and a locked room in Paris. Three Dupin stories invented most of the rules.
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7. The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett
Sam Spade and the black bird. Hammett made the detective a working man and the prose as hard as the city.
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8. A Study in Scarlet
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Holmes and Watson meet, take rooms at 221B and solve a murder that leads back to Utah. The beginning of everything.
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9. The Innocence of Father Brown
by G. K. Chesterton
A small round priest who solves crimes by understanding sinners. Chesterton's twelve stories are full of paradox and surprise.
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10. The Mystery of the Yellow Room
by Gaston Leroux
A woman is attacked in a room locked from the inside. One of the great locked-room puzzles, by the author of The Phantom of the Opera.
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11. The Sign of the Four
by Arthur Conan Doyle
A treasure, a pact and a one-legged man. The second Holmes novel, and the one where Watson falls in love.
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12. Whose Body?
by Dorothy L. Sayers
A body in a bath wearing only a pair of pince-nez. Lord Peter Wimsey's first case, and Sayers's wit from the first page.
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13. Trent’s Last Case
by E. C. Bentley
Written to mock the infallible detective, it became one of the most admired detective novels of its age.
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14. Red Harvest
by Dashiell Hammett
An unnamed operative cleans up a corrupt mining town by setting its gangs on each other. Hardboiled at its rawest.
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15. The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar
by Maurice Leblanc
The gentleman thief, France's answer to Holmes. Light and charming, and full of disguises.
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16. The Leavenworth Case
by Anna Katharine Green
A rich man shot in his library, written by a woman, before Holmes existed. It was a bestseller and taught the genre a lot.
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17. The Red House Mystery
by A. A. Milne
The author of Winnie-the-Pooh wrote one detective novel, and it is a cheerful, clever country-house puzzle.
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18. Lady Audley’s Secret
by M. E. Braddon
A Victorian bestseller: a beautiful young wife with a past, and a nephew who will not stop asking questions.
Read it as a path: Detective fiction, from the start
How the detective story was invented, one famous case at a time.
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Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.