# The 18 Best Golden Age Detective Novels

> Country houses, church bells, a bedside investigation of Richard III. The genre wrote its rules here, then broke them on purpose.

*By YPB Team · Published August 14, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-18-best-golden-age-detective-novels*

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## Current results (0 votes)

1. **The Murder of Roger Ackroyd**
   Christie's 1926 novel, the book that showed how far a detective writer could push the reader.
2. **And Then There Were None**
   Christie's 1939 island thriller, her best-selling title.
3. **Murder on the Orient Express**
   Christie's 1934 closed-carriage mystery.
4. **The Nine Tailors**
   Dorothy L. Sayers' 1934 fen-country mystery built around church bells.
5. **Gaudy Night**
   Sayers' 1935 Oxford novel, as much a love story as a mystery.
6. **The Hollow Man**
   John Dickson Carr's 1935 locked-room novel, containing the famous locked-room lecture.
7. **The Poisoned Chocolates Case**
   Anthony Berkeley's 1929 novel in which six amateurs solve the same crime six ways.
8. **Malice Aforethought**
   Francis Iles' 1931 novel that tells you the murderer on page one.
9. **Trent's Last Case**
   E.C. Bentley's 1913 novel, often called the first modern detective novel.
10. **The Red House Mystery**
   A.A. Milne's 1922 country-house mystery, written before Winnie-the-Pooh.
11. **The Beast Must Die**
   Nicholas Blake's 1938 revenge novel told partly as a murderer's diary.
12. **Murder Must Advertise**
   Sayers' 1933 novel set in the advertising agency where she once worked.
13. **Green for Danger**
   Christianna Brand's 1944 wartime mystery set in a military hospital.
14. **The Franchise Affair**
   Josephine Tey's 1948 novel about two women accused of abducting a girl.
15. **Whose Body?**
   Sayers' 1923 debut, introducing Lord Peter Wimsey.
16. **The Body in the Library**
   Christie's 1942 Miss Marple novel, a deliberate cliche turned inside out.
17. **Death of a Ghost**
   Margery Allingham's 1934 Albert Campion novel set in the London art world.
18. **The Case of the Velvet Claws**
   Erle Stanley Gardner's 1933 debut for Perry Mason.

Tags: books, crime, mystery, detective