The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, 1980 True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne, 1977 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré, 1974 The Patience of Maigret by Georges Simenon, 1965 And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, 1964 Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver, 1958 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, 1930 A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887 Above all else, these mysteries are great stories. First I read a book for the story, and then I read it to analyze it. If I want to read something critically, I read it twice.
What’s important in a great book are the characters and their motives, the themes which rise above the written page, the structure, the pacing, the figures of speech, diction and the dialogue. Don’t let any of those details bother you. Men were typically the breadwinners, and women wore lots of aprons and carried cigarettes in gold cases. People dressed differently, and in some cases, spoke differently. My second point is that when you read books that were written many years ago, sometimes they may feel dated. Or as the English philosopher, Bertrand Russell, said, “Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.”Īnd, of course, the corollary to that is that there are a lot of fantastic books out there that never won anything or were even panned when they were first published. In other words, it’s subjective, not always fair, and occasionally corrupt.
The book judging for literary prizes is a lot like the judging for championship, long-program, figure-skating. I always counsel readers not to rely solely on or weigh too heavily whether a book won a prize or several or which prize it may have won, before reading the book at hand. There are two things I’d like to mention before you read this list.įirst, in some cases, I mention book prizes that were won, and in some cases, I don’t. And don’t worry I’m not giving away any spoilers. To save myself the agony of trying to list them starting from the absolute best mystery book of all time, I’m going to list them in order of initial date of publication starting with the oldest. Within the mystery genre, there are several types, including, but not limited to, police procedurals, detective stories, hard-boiled detective stories, espionage, medical mysteries, some thrillers, some speculative fiction, cozies, and closed-room mysteries.įor the purposes of this list, I’m grouping them all together and including some from several different classifications. In books, the mystery genre usually (but not always) refers to fiction.
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