The 18 Greatest Detective Novels of All Time

Locked rooms, mean streets and one island nobody leaves. The classics are here, and so are the newer books people press on their friends.

1

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Agatha Christie's 1926 Poirot novel, famous for the narrator twist that changed detective fiction.

2

And Then There Were None

Christie's 1939 thriller in which ten strangers are killed one by one on an isolated island.

3

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Arthur Conan Doyle's 1902 Sherlock Holmes novel set on a fog-bound Dartmoor.

4

The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett's 1930 hard-boiled novel introducing San Francisco detective Sam Spade.

5

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler's 1939 debut, the template for Los Angeles noir and Philip Marlowe.

6

The Long Goodbye

Chandler's 1953 novel, widely held to be his most personal Marlowe case.

7

Gaudy Night

Dorothy L. Sayers' 1935 Oxford mystery starring Harriet Vane.

8

The Moonstone

Wilkie Collins' 1868 novel about a stolen diamond, often called the first English detective novel.

9

The Daughter of Time

Josephine Tey's 1951 novel in which a bedridden detective reinvestigates Richard III.

10

The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco's 1980 medieval murder mystery set in an Italian abbey library.

11

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Patricia Highsmith's 1955 crime novel told from the point of view of the killer.

12

The Silence of the Lambs

Thomas Harris' 1988 thriller pairing an FBI trainee with an imprisoned cannibal psychiatrist.

13

Devil in a Blue Dress

Walter Mosley's 1990 debut introducing Easy Rawlins in 1940s Black Los Angeles.

14

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson's 2005 Swedish thriller that made Nordic noir a global category.

15

In the Woods

Tana French's 2007 debut, the first of the Dublin Murder Squad novels.

16

Gone Girl

Gillian Flynn's 2012 novel about a missing wife and two unreliable narrators.

17

Murder on the Orient Express

Christie's 1934 Poirot mystery in which every passenger on a stranded train is a suspect.

18

Red Dragon

Thomas Harris' 1981 novel that introduced Hannibal Lecter and profiler Will Graham.