# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 14, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-17-greatest-fictional-detectives-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

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.

Tags: books, crime, characters, detective