Mysterylist.Com started setting up individual web pages for classic mystery novelists, but this is impractical, especially considering that the author of this web site tried to read every novel in a series when doing such a page, and many are no longer available, so the page could not be completed in a lot of instances. Also, few of these authors fall into the 'best-of-the-Golden-Age' category or Grobius's Top 50; they are mostly modern authors who write in the tradition and who, while not having produced single masterpieces, qualify for this page by having produced a body of work that does set up their detectives as being worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of investigators. (However, some important Golden Age authors were omitted, so I will try to make up to some extent for it on the Series Pages.) There is absolutely no intention for this page to become definitive or even partially complete. E-mail is welcome. See also my observations Narrative Techniques below, especially about the use of the first person.
Category Pages:
British Police | Amateurs | Professionals | Private Eyes | Cops | Historical Detectives | Superheroes | Villains
This could eventually be a very large text-based web page. Click one of the links below to skip to that author -- Grobius, June 2001
Block | Christie | Hammett | Doyle | Pronzini | Rivals of Holmes | Stout
Lawrence Block: Matt Scudder (Unlicensed Private Investigator)|
Matt Scudder is an ex-New-York-City cop who lives in a tiny room in a cheap hotel near Times Square. Although he doesn't have a PI license, he has a good reputation and takes on cases of great complexity (like nailing obvious villains who can't be brought into court), mainly for friends, often otherwise (hell, he's got to make a living somehow, even though off the tax book -- this wouldn't work in California where you apparantly depend on having a license, but maybe it doesn't matter so much in NY). He is also an alcoholic, which factor plays a major factor in his cases, especially the ones that took place before he joined AA and went sober. That defines his character, and the fact that his girlfriend is an ex-hooker, but it doesn't detract from the stories since it isn't the main point to them. Because he still hangs out with his drinking buddies, and as far as the books go plotwise gets involved in the sleaziest cases you can imagine, nothing a normal 9-to-5 PI would touch. He has angst and inhibitions and a very high moral sense, as one has grown to expect from modern private eyes, but a much higher level of tolerance (and a lower level of reluctance to exact vengeance) than his main competitor these days, Nameless by Pronzini (see below), but Block is a lot grimmer than Pronzini. His cases involve horrific stuff that even Sam Spade would have steered away from if he'd had an inkling beforehand. One nice thing is that his lowest-life friends (mobsters, pimps, informers, murderers, drug-addicts, hookers, transvestites, etc.) all have something going for them as true people that he prefers to hang around with. And Block's New York neighborhood scenes and perspective is second to none in the genre. This author knows his shit in all arsepects (ha ha). The series, which seems to be winding down recently, runs to about 15 titles so far, but I will only list my favorites. Middle ones are the best (late 1980s/early 1990s publication), after Scudder went sober but also built up a cast of regulars who develop very well (Elaine, Ballou, TJ, Chance, Danny Boy, etc.). There is a lot of wasted time (the reader's, not Scudder's) with constant AA meetings, but who wouldn't be driven to drink or AA considering what happens? The later books get more and more horrific, so maybe the author has had enough or doesn't want to go too far into Hannibal Lecter territory (he also has the Tanner 'Spy Who Can't Sleep' series and the wonderful 'Burglar' series with Bernie Rhodenbarr, among a slew of non-series books).
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Agatha Christie: Hercule Poirot (Criminal Consultant)|
An ageless geriatric, like Miss Marple. Poirot started out in Christie's first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) as a war (WWI) refugee, having retired from his profession as head of the Belgian police. He then became a private eye, with the help of his idiotic Watsonian crony Captain Hastings. By the time of his death he must have been well over 120 years old. The early stories before 1930 were very much in the Sherlock Holmes vein, but not nearly as good. Later on, he became a true detective and pretty much dropped his eccentric English and interspersions of school French phrases, though he never really lost the emphasis on his 'little grey cells' and his preference for armchair deduction, order, method, and psychology, as opposed to physical clues -- although the author did throw such things in in a very inadequate manner (purely physical clues were not really her forté), especially in the earlier stories. His deductions are brilliant, even if they sometimes don't make any sense based on the presented evidence.
Best examples: Much too difficult a shot to call since there are some 30 or more to chose from. Some random favorites: The Clocks, Murder in Retrospect, Death on the Nile, After the Funeral, and Mrs McGinty's Dead. Of course, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The best short stories are in the collection The Labors of Hercules, which is a thematic grouping hard to accomplish in the genre, but well worth attempting and pulled off very well here.
Of the many stage incarnations (including Albert Finney, miscast in that fine movie "Murder on the Orient Express"), David Suchet was perfect in the role; British television did a very nice series, with impeccable period settings, unfortunately of some of the least interesting of the early stories. But Hercule was really an insufferable little vantz. What matters are the incredibly ingenious plots of the major novels of the late 1930s up until about 1960. |
Dashiell Hammett: Continental Op, Sam Spade, and Nick Charles (Private Detectives) :: Also see Web Page |
Hammett only wrote five detective novels, but multitudes of detective short stories for the pulps, mostly starring the anonymous Continetal Op. Sam Spade appears in The Maltese Falcon, which became John Huston's classic movie with Bogart, Lorre, Greenstreet, et al, and lifted dialogue intact from this book--that's how vividly written it is. One of the early but hardly surpassed (if ever) hard-boiled detective stories. The mood of this masterpiece puts it right up there with the best of the 'noirs' (cf. Ambler and Thompson). [It can be fun to point to later movies like 'Chinatown', 'Bladerunner', and yes, 'Batman', that sort of capture a similar mood.] Nick and Nora Charles appeared in The Thin Man, which became a movie series with Dick Powell and Myrna Loy (and the dog Asta); it is rather coy, with lots of drinking -- note that the Thin Man refers to a murder suspect, not the detective. |
Bill Pronzini : The Nameless Detective (Private Investigator)|
Pronzini is a master collector of pulp detective stories, so he knows his stuff (and wrote two classic books about it: Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek). His own efforts, based on that tradition, are far better plotted and the continuing cast of characters adds a lot of interest. He has fallen into the trap of modern writers of making long sub-plots about the personal life of his detective*, but that is not really egregious in this case, although his girlfiend Kerry Wade is sometimes too much to stomach, and his buddy and eventual partner, Lt. Eberhardt of the SF police, is a jerk. But this is really a very good series, partly because you really like the main character, anonymous as he is (but not really -- he is real, even if you don't know his name). As a character, he is the most appealing PI since Hammett's Continental Op, whom he resembles. But when he goes on about how boring being a detective is, that he never gets beaten up or meets an exotic woman, you should read the books where all these things happen to him (buried in a mine-shaft, shot, stabbed, beaten unconscious several times, half-drowned, held prisoner, etc.). The plots are really excellent and the detective work very well done (although Nameless never spends more than a week or so investigating, so he is very lucky). His characters, the weird ones, the pathetic ones, and the normal ones, are always convincing. There are some clever locked-room mysteries, though not very complex or critical to the plot. Most of them, in the tried-and-true tradition, involve major hypocrisy and corruption among apparently respectable people (especially businessmen!), and sub-plots that often date back way into the past. * Shoudn't say this, but a lot of the 'Nameless' background is autobiographical, as Pronzini admits in his preface to "Casebook" -- it's really him as he'd like to be. Kerry is actually Marcia Muller (author of the Sharon McCone PI series, if it isn't her she'd be PO'd), even though he throws in in-jokes about his meeting himself at a mystery con or reading a Muller book. His (Nameless's) problems with giving up smoking and losing weight, by jogging and dieting, his love of junk food, seem too well-rendered not to be personal experiences. This is a fallacious argument, seeing autobiography in what an author writes, but seems a reasonable deduction in this case. If Lawrence Block is a recovering alcoholic (as one could gather from the Matt Scudder series), it isn't as straightforward as this. Also, too many chapters end with this sort of scene: N -- Hi, Toots. K -- Toots, you asshole? N -- Private Eyes gotta talk that way sometimes. K -- OK, big guy, want to make love or have dinner first? N: Well, I haven't eaten all day, but I guess dinner can wait. Let's make love first. ... 'And so we did.' [Ah, yuck -- if you want to put that stuff in, at least be a little more titillating about it -- this crap ain't fun and is actually of lesser quality than the sex in the pulps BP goes on about.] |
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes (Consulting Detective) :: See Web PageThe Contemporary Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Consulting Detectives) 
Ernest Bramah: Max (Wynn) Carrados
The blind detective with superior compensatory senses. (He is not actually a professional detective, more in the consultation line with his detective agency friend Louis Carlyle.) His hyperaesthenic developments of other senses since he lost his eyesight in a riding accident are hardly credible -- such as reading postmarks on envelopes with his fingertips -- but are beside the point, and are just the 'gimmick' for this rival of Holmes. What distinguishes the stories is clever plotting in several of the 30 or so cases and a nice witty style, as can be expected from the author of the entertaining Kai-Lung tales (which have movie-style Charlie Chan pseudo-Chinese aphorisms salted throughout). A nice alternative to Holmes. Trend-setting not for detection but for 'handicapped' detectives. Probably the best of the 'rivals' apart from Dr Thorndyke and The Thinking Machine.
August Derleth: Solar Pons
A horror-story writer from Wisconsin, Derleth had never been to London when he created Solar Pons of Praed Street out of frustration that there would be no more Sherlock Holmes stories. He ended up with a series of pastiches, starting in 1928, that are entertaining enough to be considered a palliative drug for the addict. The collections: Adventures (1945), Chronicles, Memoirs, Casebook, Reminiscences, Return, and Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey (a novel, 1968), followed by at least four continuations by Basil Copper. The stories are basically second-rate imitations but have their moments in filling one's Holmes addiction; they do get better the older and more experienced the author became, one of the best being "The Six Silver Spiders." (Note several howlers, however, caused by the author's ignorance of England: e.g., the prevalence of one-story houses and the substitution of News of the World, a Sunday tabloid rife with sensation, for the London Times, with its agony column -- and when did anybody ever read the Daily Mail for its financial pages?) Click here for a chronological list of the stories.
Rex Stout: Nero Wolfe (Private Detective)
| While there are no Nero Wolfe short stories (that I know of), Stout wrote about 40 novellas (50-100 pages), a form he specialized in, usually publishing them in single-volume trilogies after they had appeared in the sort of slick magazines that hardly exist any more. This is perhaps his best format, as many of the longer books seem padded given their plot structures. (Stout himself once remarked, "I discovered two things: I was a good storyteller, and I would never be a great writer." -- Baring-Gould.) |
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Miscellaneous
Among the many PI's there is no space to review here, but are well worth reading, are:
They are highly recommended. |
If I ever find the time, I will include the following of my favorite private detectives, especially the modern women who make their living that way very effectively:
There are no doubt others you can think of, hence the submission form at the bottom of the page.
Good question, eh? Most of these people are making a hard-scrabble living, not getting paid even their basic fees half the time. When do they ever have time to write their memoirs (while sitting around bored waiting for glamorous female clients to come in)? Also, their literacy and facility with catchy phrasing is not very convincing, given their profession and educational background. Raymond Chandler is, I think, to blame for this presentation of the Dick as Poet Manquée, to the extent that it has become a feature of the genre -- well, also many other prototypical authors of the Black Mask era contributed, probably to lend a spurious immediacy to the narrative. Let us just say that is a convention, although it has been superseded by authors like Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy, who use this classic dialogue style but don't limit it to the first-person narrative format. The old Angst asides of the classic private eyes become very wearing after a while, just as do g-dropping aristocrats in old-fashioned British mysteries, or attempts to render Cockney (Irish, black, or other) dialects phonetically.
Forget stream-of-consciousness or other avant-garde techniques of three generations ago, especially in a detective story. (But that doesn't exclude the marvellous dialect renditions of an expert like Leonard or the neat plate-on-a-stick-spinning throwaways of Hill's Dalziel -- these are belly-laughing funny and also in their way very evocative and poetic.) For the most part, since 'style' is only a secondary factor in mysteries, it is better to stick with a straightforward objective narrative, with nice explicit prose descriptions of settings. An alternative, when it is done properly, is to regress to an even older form, the epistolary or diary format, especially when presenting the events of a story from multiple points of view ("At this point, after so-and-so's excellent rendition, I will take up the events that occurred when I came on the scene"). That's just as phony, but in the hands of a Wilkie Collins, for example, it is devastatingly effective and works very well in a mystery story where half the plot consists of misdirection of the reader as to what actually happened -- how better to do that than by producing a convincing eye-witness account of an event as misperceived by the observer? If it is done skillfully, the author is still able to present the actual clues. This is what a good film director does by shifting camera angles.
Mail Recommendation to grobius@sprynet.com
If you would like to write your own short precis of a series detective, please send it to me by regular e-mail (click the red grobius@sprynet.com for a standard e-mail screen and include your text either as an attachment or as a block in the message area). If I approve it -- judgement is mine alone -- I will host it on this site on another web page following a similar format to this one. Once there are at least three entries, that page will become reality, with its own link on the home page, so please feel free to submit your favorite detective!
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