These five "classic" mysteries are the ones that have inspired lost´s of people over the years, and the ones I think every single book lover should read.
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1. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (1887)
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain," said Hemingway, "called Huckleberry Finn." Well, all detective fiction comes from another American, Edgar Allan Poe, who invented the genre in three brief stories. But those tales are sketchy and uneven. The person who perfected their style was Conan Doyle, who in Sherlock Holmes forever established the ideal of the brilliant, eccentric detective. I hope Sir Arthur is in Benedict Cumberbatch's bedtime prayers.
In A Study in Scarlet, Dr. John Watson, a surgeon returning from Afghanistan, takes rooms with an enigmatic "consulting detective," Holmes, and soon enough is drawn into the investigation of a corpse with the word Rache written over it in blood. Holmes' finest moments of deduction are in the short stories – "The Red-Headed League," "Silver Blaze" – but it seems appropriate to bow before his initial appearance: so quintessential that it's the first known occasion when a fictional detective used a magnifying glass.
2. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)
Mystery novelists are an unforgiving bunch. When we get together, we can take down pretty much anyone. Raymond Chandler? Bad plots. Michael Connelly? Clunky writing. Stephen King? Can't pull off endings.
But one writer is untouchable: Agatha Christie. She's too good. She's our Michael Jordan. There's a reason only Shakespeare and the Bible have run through more printings.
And Then There Were None is the perfect locked-room mystery, though the locked room happens to be an island. Ten strangers arrive there and immediately start dying, one by one. A storm cuts the island off from outside communication. The survivors go mad with suspicion and dread. And then the solution comes – chilling, ingenious, inevitable. Still, to this day, it's the best pure puzzle in the history of the genre.
3. The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald (1949)
At some invisible moment in the middle of the 20th century, America wrestled the mystery novel away from the Brits. Conan Doyle, Margery Allingham and Christie gave way to the tougher, wisecracking style of Dashiell Hammett and Chester Himes. As Raymond Chandler said, it was their job to "get murder away from the upper classes."
For my money, the best book in that hard-boiled, sun-soaked California style is The Moving Target. What's amazing about it is how the crime Lew Archer is hired to solve – the disappearance of an oil magnate – is obscured by a whole multitude of unrelated crimes. In Archer's line of work, everyone's guilty of something, even if it's not the something you're chasing. That fits the weary post-war worldview of the genre whose dispassionate detectives, like Archer, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe knew that solving one mystery only meant uncovering a few new ones. We love them because they kept trying anyway.
4. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith (1950)
Whodunit? Conan Doyle, Christie and Macdonald are very different, but each wrote conventional stories about trying to find out the answer to that question. Patricia Highsmith, by contrast, belongs with Dostoevsky and Sartre to a distinct and arguably older tradition: the whydunit, which is more concerned with the reasons someone would commit a crime than how they'd do it.
Fortunately for us, she also made them beautifully tight, well-constructed whodunits. Strangers on a Train is a nightmarish version of Mad Men, about two outwardly normal psychopaths who meet on a train and "trade" murders, agreeing to do each other's dirty work so that neither gets caught. Things go wrong, as you'd imagine. The story is so brilliant that Hitchcock poached it, turning it into a movie. But the book is better.
5. A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George (1988)
If you like, you can draw a picture of two opposing strands of mystery: the British one (the tidy drawing room solutions of Holmes and Poirot) and the American one (the messier darkness of Archer and Highsmith's other great creation, the title charlatan of The Talented Mr. Ripley).
Elizabeth George combined them. She gave murder back to the upper classes – one of her detectives, Thomas Lynley, is an earl – but she's an American, and all of her books, especially her early ones, have terrific psychological depth. She understood what Somerset Maugham said: that murder is so fascinating to us because it's the one act a person can't take back. In A Great Deliverance, a woman is found sitting with an ax beside her father's corpse, and immediately admits: "I did it." What follows is totally gripping, blending the old and new traditions of the mystery novel.
6. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
And now? We live in a period of wonderful classic mystery writers, from Sue Grafton to Louise Penny to Donna Leon. But we also live in a period when the genre has become so popular that it has infiltrated high literature, a spy behind enemy lines. Writers like Paul Auster and David Mitchell have appropriated the language and imagery of crime fiction over and over. So has Kazuo Ishiguro, and his most mysterious and affecting book is Never Let Me Go, which starts out as a simple recollection about a girl's experience at an English boarding school, and ends up somewhere very different indeed.
What Ishiguro knows is that the mystery genre goes deep to the heart of human experience. We yearn for answers, for clarification and conclusiveness, and now fiction finally matches that: These days, really, all of us are detectives.
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