Your favorite crime/detective fiction

[SimonDoom]

I've always enjoyed crime/detective fiction. There's probably no other genre of fiction that combines so many good, entertaining stories with memorable characters and simple but quality prose style. It's much better in that respect, in my experience, than science fiction, which often features poorly drawn characters and sometimes questionable prose style.

Who are your favorite crime/detective fiction authors? Why? Do they influence you in the way your write?

Three of the crime fiction authors I've really enjoyed over the last few decades are Elizabeth George, Elmore Leonard, and Michael Connelly.

Connelly writes stories about detective Harry Bosch, set in LA. It has a lot of elements of noir: the setting is seedy, the tone is cynical, everyone's out for themselves, the hero, Bosch, is a cynical, rebellious loner who does things his way. The writing is very good. If you are trying to sort out your writing style he's a good author to read to see how you can write well without writing in a "literary" way. It's not complicated. He's also a great example of how you can write effectively in the third-person limited point of view.

George writes very complex stories from an omniscient point of view. Her books are long and the character relations are very tangled. The relationships are almost more important than whatever the mystery is. She's an American who writes stories set in England, so she's a good example of what you can accomplish with enough research. I don't know how her books come across to a British reader but from an American point of view she seems to pull it off quite well. She's another good model to follow for excellent prose style.

Elmore Leonard was a strong advocate for a simple, stripped-down prose style. He was one of those who said you should never use a dialogue tag other than "said" or "asked."

I would say all three of these authors influence how I write, or try to write, at least.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I've always enjoyed crime/detective fiction. There's probably no other genre of fiction that combines so many good, entertaining stories with memorable characters and simple but quality prose style. It's much better in that respect, in my experience, than science fiction, which often features poorly drawn characters and sometimes questionable prose style.

Who are your favorite crime/detective fiction authors? Why? Do they influence you in the way your write?

Three of the crime fiction authors I've really enjoyed over the last few decades are Elizabeth George, Elmore Leonard, and Michael Connelly.

Connelly writes stories about detective Harry Bosch, set in LA. It has a lot of elements of noir: the setting is seedy, the tone is cynical, everyone's out for themselves, the hero, Bosch, is a cynical, rebellious loner who does things his way. The writing is very good. If you are trying to sort out your writing style he's a good author to read to see how you can write well without writing in a "literary" way. It's not complicated. He's also a great example of how you can write effectively in the third-person limited point of view.

George writes very complex stories from an omniscient point of view. Her books are long and the character relations are very tangled. The relationships are almost more important than whatever the mystery is. She's an American who writes stories set in England, so she's a good example of what you can accomplish with enough research. I don't know how her books come across to a British reader but from an American point of view she seems to pull it off quite well. She's another good model to follow for excellent prose style.

Elmore Leonard was a strong advocate for a simple, stripped-down prose style. He was one of those who said you should never use a dialogue tag other than "said" or "asked."

I would say all three of these authors influence how I write, or try to write, at least.

I whole heartedly agree with Michael Connelly. Robert Crais is a contemprary of his and they frequently refer to their main characters in each other's stories (Elvis Cole and Harry Bosch). Stephen Cannell is another one that I would mention, both for his screenwriting as well as for his published books.

I also enjoyed watching Connelly and Cannell when they would guest on the television series, "Castle".

 

[lovecraft68]

Although I enjoy watching some of the old Noir style movies-there's a great show on a cable channel called Noir Alley that features them-I don't tend to read anything completely dedicated to to that genre, but enjoy when its incorporated into something else...mostly horror of course.

Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions both the story and movie is a great blend of horror with some hardboiled detective story worked in.

Angel Heart with Bonet and Rourke is another good example.

I think the first season of True Detective had some of this flavor as well although Harrison's character came off as more asshole cop than anything else, but McConaughey's character, especially in the 'now' part of the storyline had the old school vibe of noir.

 

[ElectricBlue]

John le Carre is about it for me when it comes to this, although he's espionage, not crime nor detective.

Closer, I guess, are the British writers Nicci French (a husband and wife pair who write psychological crime dramas - always with the first half, one character thinks something has happened, then the second half places a twist across the action, being told from another point of view); and Minette Walters, who writes complex characters unravelling. The BBC have made several good TV series from her novels.

The American crime genre? Never got into it. I've heard of Elmore Leonard, but have never read anything. I've not heard of those other writers.

Most of my literature comes out of the UK - the written ties in Australia are closer culturally to Mother England, i think, being part of the Commonwealth (and my English parents). Same for TV - our national broadcaster had very strong ties with the BBC all through the twentieth century, and that's left its legacy with my tastes.

I'll always watch a Brit crime procedural over anything else on TV these days - the Welsh arm of the Beeb have done some really good things these last few years - Welsh Noir, almost - as well as making Doctor Who.

 

[Auden James]

On LIT? It's probably dr_mabeuse's "Matt Danger & the Bound Angel" duology, without question one of the sexiest and most well-written gumshoe stories on here—and possibly even beyond.

Hjortsberg's "Falling Angel," the source of the Mickey Rourke film from the 80s mentioned above by lovecraft68, is also one of the most thrilling detective novels, especially in the hard-boiled style, at least as far as I can tell.

 

[windar]

I'm a big fan of the late Henning Mankell. Inspector Wallander has just the right mix of doggedness with occasional bouts of intuition.

My co-author and I have penned a series of crime/detective novellas under the series title "The Kinky Detectives". They solve crimes in between messing around with each other and eating some good food. I honestly think the first few were good, though, as often happens, we probably pushed things a bit too far in the later ones.

 

[KeithD]

I write crime/detective/espionage both in the mainstream and here at Literotica, so I follow a boatload of authors in this area (these don't include my major reads for espionage authors)

From the past: Christie, of course, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Eric Ambler, Raymond Chandler, Dorthy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, Alastair MacLean, Ross MacDonald, Frederick Forsyth, Dashell Hammett, Victoria Holt, Helen MacInnis, Josephine Tey, Daphne du Maurier, Sara Paretsky, Ruth Rendell, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Robert Van Gulik

More recently (in that I haven't read them for a couple years): David Baldacci, Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Dick Francis, Elizabeth George, John Gilstrip, Sue Grafton, Martha Grimes, Georgette Heyer, Tami Hoag, P.D. James, Jonathan Kellerman, Elizabeth Peters, Ellis Peters, Kathy Reichs, Lisa Scottoline, Marcia Talley, Margaret Truman, Scott Turrow

Currently: Andrea Camilleri (Italy--alhough I just finished reading them all--he died in Dec 2019), Donna Leon (Venice), Louise Penny (Canada), Ellen Crosby (Virginia), Lindsey Davis (ancient Rome), John Grisham (the South), Michael Pearce (old Egypt), Anne Perry (Vintage UK), Steven Saylor (ancient Rome), Victoria Thompson (old New York), Martin Walker (France), Jason Webster (Spain), Jean-Luc Bannalec (Brittany), James Church (North Korea). John Burdett (Thailand)

Unfavorites: Lillian Jackson Braun, Rita Mae Brown (but I know her and have to read them), Patricia Cornwall, Mary Daheim

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Top has to be Dorothy Sayers at her best. I never read her when younger and churning through Christie etc, because the first one I read was Documents in the Case (edit: with someone else, but not posthumous) and the whole plot was obvious to anyone who had highschool chemistry. I'm actually glad as much of the allusion would have gone over my head 30 years ago

Then the Nine Tailors converted me (though Five Red Herrings wasn't great plotwise).

I like Raymond Chandler, PD James and have read many others though many modern ones are either too gory or too ditzy for me. Rivers of London is great police procedural with a magical twist which gets London and attitudes of the crime-solvers spot on, though as the series goes on, plot is being stretched thin. Often a problem - the first five or so Patricia Cornwells were good before turning into implausible bobbins, eventually resulting in the author deciding to ignore everything in the previous few books...

 

[KeithD]

the first five or so Patricia Cornwells were good before turning into implausible bobbins, eventually resulting in the author deciding to ignore everything in the previous few books...

The Cornwell problem, which I agree with (I knew her in her Richmond years. She got just too morose for me--and she was run out of Richmond for seducing the governor's wife) is happening with Rita Mae Brown too (who did--and can--write wicked nonfiction. She has a horse spread on Afton Mountain and says she writes her silly animal mysteries to keep the horses in hay). Anne Perry (who I've also met and has a murder of her own in her past--rendered in the movie Heavenly Creatures) seems just to have given research/writing over to ghostwriters who are lousy at checking what has already happened in her series. Whoever is writing these is also padding them out. They are very repetitive. My wife has brought a stack of them into the house, though, and I'm compelled to read most of what my wife does so we can discuss them. I'm now reading the fourth of her five-book WWI series that she was only beginning to write the last time I talked with her.

PDJames was my favorite crime read for a while (until she died), with the exception of Death Comes to Pemberley, which I thought was something she shouldn't even have tried.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Top has to be Dorothy Sayers at her best. I never read her when younger and churning through Christie etc, because the first one I read was Documents in the Case (finished by someone else posthumously) and the whole plot was obvious to anyone who had highschool chemistry. I'm actually glad as much of the allusion would have gone over my head 30 years ago

Documents in the Case was co-authored but not posthumous (first pub. 1930, DLS died 1957). You might be thinking of Jill Paton Walsh's DLS continuations there, in particular Thrones, Dominations which was based on an unpublished DLS manuscript.

I wonder whether the scientific twist in Documents in the Case would have been as obvious to a 1930s audience. The relevant idea was certainly known to academics but I'm not sure it would have been part of a school curriculum back then.

DLS is an interesting departure from the standard whodunnit formula in that there's rarely very much mystery about the identity of the culprit, and the question's more how they did it or how it can be proved.

I like Raymond Chandler, PD James and have read many others though many modern ones are either too gory or too ditzy for me. Rivers of London is great police procedural with a magical twist which gets London and attitudes of the crime-solvers spot on, though as the series goes on, plot is being stretched thin. Often a problem - the first five or so Patricia Cornwells were good before turning into implausible bobbins, eventually resulting in the author deciding to ignore everything in the previous few books...

Yeah, I enjoyed the early Rivers of London books but I've found it harder to maintain enthusiasm as the series went on. To be fair, the pandemic really cut into my ability to focus on any kind of long read, so not entirely their fault :-/

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Documents in the Case was co-authored but not posthumous (first pub. 1930, DLS died 1957). ...

I wonder whether the scientific twist in Documents in the Case would have been as obvious to a 1930s audience. The relevant idea was certainly known to academics but I'm not sure it would have been part of a school curriculum back then.

Ah, I knew it was co-authored and assumed because she'd died - it was her last, right?

I'm sure it wasn't part of school curricula until the 50s and even then not many kids would have done O-level Chemistry - it wasn't until GCSE in 1988 that doing all three sciences to age 16 became compulsory.

Robin Stevens' Wells and Wong stories set in a boarding school of indeterminate date are also very good.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Ah, I knew it was co-authored and assumed because she'd died - it was her last, right?

Not Documents in the Case, she had quite a few after that. Looks like her co-author on that one was a physician/writer who supplied the scientific part of the story.

 

[oggbashan]

Ellis Peters Cadfael novels, and her modern detective ones as well.

A lesser-known modern: Dorothy Simpson's Inspector Thanet novels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Simpson

 

[stxjimmy]

I like Michael Connelly. Harry Bosch, and his philosophy everybody matters or nobody matters, is a fine creation.
Elmore Leonard is so funny, and writes well of the fuckwittery of much criminality.
Raymond Chandler is also a fine sparse writer, often reminding me of Hemingway, though his plots can be labyrinth like.
But for me the finest is Henrik Mankells Wallender series. A dedicated detective and a flawed human being, a humanist trying to be his best self in a confusing world.

 

[SimonDoom]

Top has to be Dorothy Sayers at her best. I never read her when younger and churning through Christie etc, because the first one I read was Documents in the Case (finished by someone else posthumously) and the whole plot was obvious to anyone who had highschool chemistry. I'm actually glad as much of the allusion would have gone over my head 30 years ago

Then the Nine Tailors converted me (though Five Red Herrings wasn't great plotwise).

I like Raymond Chandler, PD James and have read many others though many modern ones are either too gory or too ditzy for me. Rivers of London is great police procedural with a magical twist which gets London and attitudes of the crime-solvers spot on, though as the series goes on, plot is being stretched thin. Often a problem - the first five or so Patricia Cornwells were good before turning into implausible bobbins, eventually resulting in the author deciding to ignore everything in the previous few books...

I somehow have managed not to read anything by Dorothy Sayers. I'll have to remedy that. Do you have a recommendation among her books?

PD James is very good. A nice style, understated. Dalgleish is a good example of what I think of as a distinctly British detective.

Chandler is great, but one has to be careful about using noir-style fiction as a model for prose because it's easy to make it read like a parody if one isn't careful.

 

[8letters]

Dick Francis is my favorite crime/detective writer. I've modeled my Literotica stories on his stories. Everyday guy going about his work, someone is murdered, the everyday guy gets sucked into the mystery and eventually figures out who is the murder. All his stories are set in the horse racing world, but each one explores a different aspect of it. For example, one story is about a caterer who provides meals to parties at horse race events. Usually, there's a love story that adds a lot emotionally.

 

[NotWise]

No-one for Mickey Spillane?

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I somehow have managed not to read anything by Dorothy Sayers. I'll have to remedy that. Do you have a recommendation among her books?

Whose Body? is the first with Lord Peter Wimsey. Murder Must Advertise is one of the best, or Strong Poison. Gaudy Night is possibly the best but you need to have read the previous ones with Harriet Vane to appreciate it.

Cadfael and Dick Francis are good and plentiful - a little formulaic but always with a bit of new info about their well-researched worlds. Like Agatha Christie, the sort of books you want to read when recuperating from something.

Someone mentioned Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano - are the books good? I've seen a fair bit of the TV series which is mostly fun for being very Italian and Sicilian and showing our Inspector getting his leg over every episode, but Wiki suggests the books go into the local cultural issues (local plods having to deal with both Rome issuing central directives, and the local Mafia) much better.

 

[HeyAll]

Simon Kernick

Sadly, he's an underrappreciated author, but he has written a lot of books and continues to write. Some books are better than others, but when he hits, it's fantastic. What I like about his books is that they're fast past with a lot of twists. He's spent a lot of time with detectives in Britain and it shows in his writing. I also like the plots because they're about criminal conspiracies, rather than serial killers, which is what a lot of modern crime writing focuses on.

His writing is non-pretentious. It's written like you're at a bar and someone is telling you a story. There are a lot of expressions and phrases in the narrative.

If you're interested in checking out this author, read in order, starting with the Buisness of Dying, because the books have a shared universe. Lots of characters come and go through the novels.

 

[oggbashan]

G K Chesterton: Father Brown Stories

Ernest Bramah: Max Carrados

 

[KeithD]

Simon Kernick

Sadly, he's an underrappreciated author, but he has written a lot of books and continues to write. Some books are better than others, but when he hits, it's fantastic. What I like about his books is that they're fast past with a lot of twists. He's spent a lot of time with detectives in Britain and it shows in his writing. I also like the plots because they're about criminal conspiracies, rather than serial killers, which is what a lot of modern crime writing focuses on.

His writing is non-pretentious. It's written like you're at a bar and someone is telling you a story. There are a lot of expressions and phrases in the narrative.

If you're interested in checking out this author, read in order, starting with the Buisness of Dying, because the books have a shared universe. Lots of characters come and go through the novels.

Thanks. I'd never heard of him. Most of the authors on my current read list (being on this list means I try to read everything, chronologically), like Camilleri, Webster, Martin, and Jean-Luc Bannalec were picked up from such recommendations.

 

[lovecraft68]

For anyone interested, a book series that mingles the supernatural with detective/vigilante themes is the Repairman Jack books by F Paul Wilson. Jack initially appeared in the Tomb a traditional horror novel, but was so immensely popular, he garnered his own series. This is a list of the books in order

https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/repairman-jack/

I've fallen behind with the Last Rokash being last I read. I own the next to, but time is short and I don't read anywhere near as much as I used to.

 

[KeithD]

Someone mentioned Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano - are the books good? I've seen a fair bit of the TV series which is mostly fun for being very Italian and Sicilian and showing our Inspector getting his leg over every episode, but Wiki suggests the books go into the local cultural issues (local plods having to deal with both Rome issuing central directives, and the local Mafia) much better.

I've now read all of his. I enjoyed them as good "take a break" reads from my own writing. They are novella length, aren't heavy, and they have a quirkiest about them that is engaging. Some of the quirks (e.g., the mispronunciations of the unit telephone operator, for instance) get irritating, but I just read through those. They include the corruption of the local police but don't to so as heavily and frustratingly as I find Donna Leon's Venetian books do.

I haven't seen any of the TV series and others who have done both the books and the TV tell me that the TV Montalbano is too different for them to enjoy both versions of the detective (although the book Montalbano always comes across to me as younger than he is--and closer to the age of the TV version). Food is important in these books, as, strangely enough, it is in most of the foreign detective series I'm now reading, but I don't really relate much to the discussions included of different dishes.

The last book published, the one he held back for publishing after his death, Riccardino, is really quirky, in that he, as the author, becomes a character in the book--by means of memos and telephone conversations--and the Montalbano of the book has nits to pick about Montalbano of the TV series.

 

[BarracudaSwordfish]

Ian Rankin's Rebus series for me.

Great characters, familiar haunts, and the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh beloved by the Inspector really does exist and is a great pub!

 

[rosebudliquor]

I echo some of the modern American writers, but I'm chiming in to respond to mentions of Raymond Chandler and the question about Mickey Spillane (try that author challenge coming up!). Dashiell Hammett is the top guy in that field, James M. Cain is better at making characters real than Spillane, and Ross MacDonald is amazing. Big Jim Thompson is Mickey Spillane done better. Back to slightly more modern stuff: read Lawrence Block.