# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 14, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-18-greatest-detective-novels-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

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.

Tags: books, crime, mystery, detective