The 17 Greatest Fictional Detectives of All Time

Some of them are 180 years old, some arrived last decade, and they solve nothing the same way. Pick the one you would actually hand a case to.

1

Hercule Poirot

Agatha Christie's fastidious Belgian detective, star of 33 novels and the little grey cells.

2

Miss Marple

Christie's elderly St Mary Mead spinster who solves murders by village analogy.

3

Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, the template for the genre.

4

Philip Marlowe

Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles private eye, the voice of American noir.

5

Sam Spade

Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco private detective from The Maltese Falcon.

6

Columbo

The rumpled LAPD lieutenant whose 'just one more thing' undoes every confident killer.

7

Lord Peter Wimsey

Dorothy L. Sayers' aristocratic amateur sleuth of the 1920s and 30s.

8

Jules Maigret

Georges Simenon's pipe-smoking Paris commissaire, hero of 75 novels.

9

Father Brown

G.K. Chesterton's unassuming Catholic priest who reads sin rather than clues.

10

Nancy Drew

The teenage sleuth of River Heights who introduced generations of readers to mysteries.

11

Inspector Morse

Colin Dexter's crossword-solving, opera-loving Oxford detective.

12

Harry Bosch

Michael Connelly's LAPD homicide detective, working cases nobody else will.

13

Benoit Blanc

Rian Johnson's Southern-accented private detective from the Knives Out films.

14

Sam Vimes

Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork City Watch commander, a detective in a fantasy city.

15

Kurt Wallander

Henning Mankell's melancholy Swedish inspector from Ystad.

16

Dupin

Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, the first detective in fiction, from 1841.

17

Veronica Mars

The teenage private investigator of Neptune, California, working her father's cases.