Crime classics from one of our customers

October books member and supporter Roger Brown has provided us with some recommended crime and thriller reads, five titles, some classic titles to pique your interest if you are new to the genre and some newer works from todays authors. So here goes... 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
The most famous detective in fiction in a great Gothic novel. As well as the most distinctive detective, Conan Doyle introduces the amanuensis (Dr Watson) who acts as a foil to the great man and a bridge to the reader. Unlike many of the other books in this list, The Hound has not yet been filmed successfully (Jeremy Brett is closest to Conan Doyle’s sleuth of those who’ve played the role).

Dorothy L. Sayers - The Nine Tailors (1934)
Agatha Christie is the most famous and most prolific of all crime writers but Dorothy L. Sayers is as good, The Nine Tailors has an ingenious plot and the archetypal posh detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. 

Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep (1939)
As an antidote to British Golden Age fiction, try the contemporaneous ‘hard boiled’ school of American detective fiction. The Big Sleep is quintessential Chandler with its gumshoe, femme fatale, wicked gangster and sinister context but above all an inimitable prose style.

Henning Mankel - Faceless Killers (1991)
Mankell’s Inspector Wallander is a world-weary, insecure policeman solving ghastly crimes in peaceful Ystad, and this detective novel enters a new phase with the clearly
autobiographical central figure baring his soul. Mankell is a talented writer whose other novels are worth exploring

Sara Paretsky - Killing Orders (1985)
Also bang up to date is Sara Paretsky’s marvellous V (for Victoria) I Warshawsky. Based in Chicago, Warshawsky is a modern equivalent of Philip Marlowe. Each of Paretsky’s novels involves crime at a major American institution: in this case at a Dominican Priory.

All books available in store in our Crime Fiction Section next to the counter.