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Nick Fuller's Best Books

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 12 months ago

Having damned several books, I thought I should list the best.

  

    To me, the best detective story is both a good detective story (original ideas, misdirection, ingenuity, surprise solutions) and a good story (style, characterisation, atmosphere).  It must be character-driven, and the murderer a major character; it must have a unique tone; it must have a memorable situation and setting; it must have a genuinely baffling problem, and an original plot; and it should say something about human nature - subtly, with the plot embodying the theme, but without being political propaganda disguised as a crime story, with the moral duly pointed out.  (There's a lot of room here, since it doesn't just mean the mean-spirited tawdriness of a lot of modern writers, but includes writers with such different philosophies and approaches as Gladys Mitchell, Henry Wade, PD James, Michael Innes, Ruth Rendell and Edmund Crispin.)

 

  

  So:

  

  •   Dancers in Mourning (Margery Allingham, 1937)
  •   The Fashion in Shrouds (Allingham, 1938)
  •   More Work for the Undertaker (Allingham, 1948)

  

  Every Allingham book has its own tone - bucolic comedy, social satire, morality play, regret for the past - and the series becomes darker and subtler over time.  Albert Campion, the chameleon-like sleuth, is also involved personally, a device which is always effectively used.  These three are some of Allingham's best: a theatrical novel, in which Campion falls in love with the main suspect's wife; a long Galsworthyish comedy of manners, involving haute couture, the haut monde and the demi-monde (and that's probably a quote!); and a colourful tale of Dickensian eccentrics in an old boarding-house.  The murderer is inevitable: only one person could have committed the crime in that way, and for that reason.

  

  

  •   Shadow on the Wall (HC Bailey, 1934)
  •   The Sullen Sky Mystery (Bailey, 1935)
  •   Black Land, White Land (Bailey, 1937)

  

  Most of the Bailey novels are bad – boring police procedure, elliptical style, and melodramatic conspiracies – but the 1930s ones aren’t bad at all.  Sullen Sky is terrific – it’s got one of the most devious bastards ever to wear the mantle of Sherlock Holmes, a hypocritical lawyer named Josh Clunk, who sucks sweets and hums hymns – and who is an arch-manipulator like Sylvester McCoy's Doctor; an interesting plot involving real estate fraud and police corruption in a small town (more realistic than most Golden Age books are supposed to be); and really stunning misdirection – how many of the clues are fake, and how many of the faked clues are real?  Shadow on the Wall has lots of murders and a good bit of social satire, and Black Land is about ancestral passions and Greek tragedy, and has a great, almost sublime, finish.

  

  

  •   The Poisoned Chocolates Case (Anthony Berkeley, 1929)
  •   Trial and Error (Berkeley, 1937)

  

  Berkeley only wrote a dozen or so books (like Sayers and Crispin), most of which were forgotten until recently, but his reputation relied on these two plus the Francis Iles psychological thrillers Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact.  These two show different aspects of Berkeley’s genius: Poisoned Chocolates is the pure detective story taken to logical extremes, as the Crimes Circle (=the Detection Club) solve the same murder six different times, using the same evidence – lots of really clever and very funny solutions, and a really surprising yet foreshadowed murderer.  Trial is more Iles-y, with the murderer (a man who knows that he will be dead by the end of the year, and decides to benefit humanity by bumping off an undesirable) known from the start, and the interest being why he committed the crime, and whether he will get away with it – lots of great scenes (Wyatt James suggested the bit where Mr. Todhunter punches the hangman), clever satire on the British legal

 system, and another really startling twist.

  

  

  •   Thou Shell of Death (Nicholas Blake, 1936)
  •   There's Trouble Brewing (Blake, 1937)
  •   The Case of the Abominable Snowman (Blake, 1941)
  •   Head of a Traveller (Blake, 1949)
  •   The Widow's Cruise (Blake, 1959)

  

  Nicholas Blake's books are obvious inspirations for PD James.  They combine the formal detective story (clues and alibis) with deeper characterisation, a strong sense of place, a more introspective sleuth (Nigel Strangeways) and fully-rounded characters, particularly murderers and victims (perhaps too fully-rounded, in some cases - Minute for Murder, as Jon said recently).  The murderer is psychologically plausible, understandable, and even sympathetic - very few are arrested, and most commit suicide, with Strangeways's help.  Head of a Traveller, an exploration of poetry, and which ends in confusion and uncertainty, is remarkable.

  

  

  •   Green for Danger (Christianna Brand, 1945)
  •   London Particular (Brand, 1952)
  •   Tour de Force (Brand, 1955)

  

  GfD is probably the most representative Brand, although Tour de Force (set on a Mediterranean island) and London Particular / Fog of Doubt (great courtroom drama) are both terrific.  The books do tend to follow a certain basic pattern: the first murder is that of an outsider while the second brings it closer to home; by this time, the reader has become involved with the characters, so cares about them, and doesn't want certain ones to be guilty.  Most of Brand’s books only have half a dozen suspects, all with equally strong motives and opportunity, yet it's pretty impossible to work out which of them actually did it.  All the clues fit into place with that satisfying Agatha Christie type click.

  

  

  •   The Hollow Man (John Dickson Carr, 1935)
  •   The Arabian Nights Murder (Carr, 1936)
  •   The Crooked Hinge (Carr, 1938)
  •   The Black Spectacles (Carr, 1939)
  •   The Plague Court Murders (Carter Dickson, 1934)
  •   The Red Widow Murders (Dickson, 1935)
  •   The Reader is Warned (Dickson, 1939)
  •   Nine - and Death Makes Ten (Dickson, 1941)
  •   She Died a Lady (Dickson, 1943)

  

  John Dickson Carr – greatest detective story writer of them all.  Compared to Christie, he’s more fun – there’s more action and atmosphere, the murders are more complex and gruesome, and the clueing is more detailed – plus there’s the bafflement appeal of the impossible crime: how could the victim have been strangled in the middle of a field of snow without the murderer leaving any footprints / been stabbed in front of five people who never saw a thing / been bludgeoned in a locked and sealed room?  These are all from Carr’s greatest and most prolific period, the mid-to-late 1930s, when he was writing four detective stories a year (two Dr. Fells and two Sir Henry Merrivales, under the pseudonym of Carter Dickson), nearly all of which were long, complex and highly ingenious, with interesting characters and a strong atmosphere.  All are terrific, but The Arabian Nights Murder, which involves very strange (and silly) things going on in a museum in the middle of the night

 (cookery books, false beards, and Harun Al-Rashid’s missus), and The Reader is Warned, broader in scope with a sci-fi threat like EP Jacobs' Marque Jaune, are possibly the best.

  

  

  •   The Complete Father Brown Stories (GK Chesterton)

  

  The best detective stories ever written.  Original plots; vivid characters; macabre situations; breathtaking solutions - and beautifully written.  Absolutely amazing.

  

  

  •   The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie, 1926)
  •   Lord Edgware Dies (Christie, 1933)
  •   Murder on the Orient Express (Christie, 1934)
  •   Cards on the Table (Christie, 1936)
  •   Death on the Nile (Christie, 1937)
  •   Evil under the Sun (Christie, 1941)
  •   Five Little Pigs (Christie, 1942)
  •   Towards Zero (Christie, 1944)

  

  Although it's fashionable to look on Christie as the archetypal detective writer, with little interest in anything other than clues and surprising murderers, little talent for characterisation, and a cosy view of the world, she's a much more talented writer.  (Compare her to any of her imitators - ECR Lorac, Georgette Heyer, Anthony Gilbert.)  The 1920s ones are good, rather generic, detective stories, but even then she's using the cliches of the genre to fool the reader (Roger Ackroyd, of course, her first masterpiece, but also The 7 Dials Mystery and Partners in Crime).  The 1930s ones are her greatest detective stories, nearly all with Poirot, and include some of her best books (Lord Edgware Dies, Orient Express, Cards on the Table, Death on the Nile).  In the 1940s, she varies her technique more, producing character-driven stories (Five Little Pigs, Towards Zero, The Hollow, Taken at the Flood), and producing some of her most interesting books.  The 1950s ones are  slightly more conventional, and there's a definite decline in the mid-50s (beginning with They Do It With Mirrors and Destination Unknown).  The late ones are weaker detective stories, but also much darker in tone, with the recurring theme of Evil, more macabre elements, and an increasing tendency to wax nostalgic about what Britain was like compared to what it is now (seen at its worst in Postern of Fate).

  

  

  •   Holy Disorders (Edmund Crispin, 1945)
  •   Swan Song (Crispin, 1947)
  •   Love Lies Bleeding (Crispin, 1948)
  •   The Long Divorce (Crispin, 1951)

  

  Crispin is wonderful, one of my favourite writers, regardless of genre, and part of the long tradition of English comic novelists that includes Waugh, Adams, Pratchett and Fforde.  The detective problems are usually excellent, with good gimmicks, but what makes the books so great are the style, the characters (especially Gervase Fen, the detective) and the comic digressions (Wilkes's cage of copulating monkeys, Canon Garbin's raven, the lunatic and the poltergeist).  Swan Song (which involves Wagner's Meistersinger von Nürnberg) is possibly the best, although Holy Disorders (Satanists in a cathedral town), Love Lies Bleeding (a Shakespeare MS and a school), and The Long Divorce (a poison-pen in a small village) are also great.  I need to reread The Glimpses of the Moon, which is either hated or loved.

  

  

  •   The Eye of Osiris (R Austin Freeman, 1911)
  •   The D'Arblay Mystery (Freeman, 1926)
  •   As a Thief in the Night (Freeman, 1928)
  •   Mr Pottermack's Oversight (Freeman, 1930)

  

  Although Symons described Freeman as like "chewing on dry straw", the books have strong period charm, excellent scientific detection, and ingenious solutions - and the characterisation is often good.  This is, after all, the man who invented the inverted detective story, told from the perspective of the murderer - see Mr Pottermack for a full-length version.  Freeman's best, though, is As a Thief in the Night, which has a superb murder method AND great characterisation of the narrator - a similar, although very different, device to Roger Ackroyd.

  

  

  •   Suicide Excepted (Cyril Hare, 1939)
  •   Tragedy at Law (Hare, 1942)

  

  Hare wrote nine detective stories, mostly excellent, with good settings and characterisation, many involving the law and legal quibbles (cf Tragedy at Law), but only really achieved greatness with this, which involves amateur detectives determined to prove that their father's "suicide" was murder, and with one of the best surprises in the genre (unless you've read Barzun & Taylor).

  

  

  •   Recalled to Life (Reginald Hill, 1992)
  •   Pictures of Perfection (Hill, 1994)
  •   The Wood Beyond (Hill, 1996)
  •   On Beulah Height (Hill, 1998)
  •   Dialogues of the Dead (Hill, 2001)

  

  Hill is unquestionably Top Ten, up there with the very best of them.  His books are a mixture of police procedural (Dalziel, fat and uncouth, yet very subtle, and the more liberal Peter Pascoe), Golden Age detective story and literary pastiche, combining the humour and brilliantly complex plotting of Crispin or Innes with the modern writers’ emphasis on the darker side of life.  The early ones, as Symons correctly recognised, are ‘intelligent but awkward’ – they’re good, but Hill hadn’t found his voice.  The best ones were written after the late 1980s, starting with Under World, much longer and more ambitious than the earlier ones.  A lot of the 1990s ones are astounding: Recalled to Life, which begins with a flashback to the last Golden Age murder in the early 60s and then shows what happened to the characters thirty years later, and does it all as a Dickensian novel; Pictures of Perfection, a delightful Jane Austen pastiche and elaborate joke; The Wood Beyond, an extraordinary book about the horrors of World War One, with chapters alternating between past and present; On Beulah Height, his most emotional book, about missing children and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder; and Dialogues of the Dead, which is a high-spirited intellectual problem involving one of those pattern serial killers and a brilliant twist at the end.  In both Beulah Height and Dialogues, Hill plays the risky game of having the major clue right at the start, even before the story begins, and does it as brilliantly as Robert Robinson in Landscape for Dead Dons.  Worryingly, though, Hill’s new book, The Death of Dalziel, suggests that he may have finished the series.

  

  

  •   Death at the President's Lodging (Michael Innes, 1936)
  •   Hamlet, Revenge! (Innes, 1937)
  •   Lament for a Maker (Innes, 1938)
  •   Stop Press (Innes, 1939)
  •   From London Far (Innes, 1946)

  

  Innes’s books take place in a kind of Wodehousian never-never-land, full of big country houses, bad baronets and eccentric dons with names like Snodgrass and Bultitude.  The later ones got self-indulgent and slight (he was writing for fifty years, into the mid-eighties!), but the early ones are very clever and very daft, with ultra-complex plots and a nice sense of humour (c.f. From London Far, one of the best thrillers).  Perhaps the best debut ever: four masterpieces in rapid succession, after which he went into slight decline.  Hamlet, Revenge! is a genuine classic (on almost every “best of” list), and is set in an enormous country house (Scamnum Court, like Blenheim) where the Lord Chamberlain is shot dead while acting Polonius.  Lament for a Maker is told from five or six different perspectives, and is about the death of a maniacal Scottish laird – lots of twists and turns and multiple solutions, and a flashback to the South Australia outback.  Stop Press is that rare thing, a detective story without a murder, and is very blackly funny (a bit like Cold Comfort Farm, and even perhaps like Hill’s Pictures of Perfection).

  

  

  •   Shroud for a Nightingale (PD James, 1971)
  •   The Black Tower (James, 1975)
  •   Death of an Expert Witness (James, 1977)
  •   A Taste for Death (James, 1986)

  

  James's books are a perfect example of what I mean: she uses the formal structure of the detective story (murder, investigation, deduction, solution) to examine human nature.  Her characters are people, convincing and understandable, even if not exactly likeable, and one often feels sympathy for the murderers and understands why they do what they do (c.f. Shroud for a Nightingale).  The later books aren't as good, though; several are far too long and lack focus (Devices and Desires), rather clumsily reveal the characters' back stories when they are introduced, have banal plots (Death in Holy Orders) or recycle earlier books (Original Sin), and wallow in gloom and despair.

  

  

  •   Overture to Death (Ngaio Marsh, 1939)
  •   Surfeit of Lampreys (Marsh, 1940)
  •   Colour Scheme (Marsh, 1943)
  •   Final Curtain (Marsh, 1947)
  •   Scales of Justice (Marsh, 1955)
  •   Singing in the Shrouds (Marsh, 1959)

  

  Unusually, Marsh's later books are generally better than the earlier ones - the early 1930s books are rather arch and lightweight, with irrelevant thriller bits (sinister Russian brotherhoods, Communist agitators), but the books of the late 1930s through to the end of her career are very high quality: good detective problems, with memorable murder methods (exploding pianos, boiling mud-pools), good characterisation and dialogue, and a strong sense of place.  Overture to Death, a classic village problem, is possibly the best, although it's hard to choose.

  

  

  •   The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (Gladys Mitchell, 1929)
  •   The Saltmarsh Murders (Mitchell, 1932)
  •   Death at the Opera (Mitchell, 1934)
  •   The Devil at Saxon Wall (Mitchell, 1935)
  •   Come Away, Death (Mitchelll, 1937)
  •   St Peter's Finger (Mitchell, 1938)
  •   Brazen Tongue (Mitchell, 1940)
  •   When Last I Died (Mitchell, 1941)
  •   The Rising of the Moon (Mitchell, 1945)
  •   Death and the Maiden (Mitchell, 1947)
  •   The Echoing Strangers (Mitchell, 1942)

  

  You were expecting this, weren't you?  GM is my favourite (detective) writer - a great stylist, whose books, at their best, have a unique atmosphere or tone (rollicking farce in the sexually outspoken Saltmarsh Murders; drought and paganism in The Devil at Saxon Wall; the sombre ancientness of Greece in Come Away, Death; the religious calm of the convent in St Peter's Finger) or an unusual narrative device (When Last I Died is, possibly, the first historiographical detective story; Sunset over Soho plays with the unreliable narrator and tells the story as a series of flashbacks and Chinese box stories within stories; and The Rising of the Moon is told by an adolescent boy).  The characterisation is vivid yet convincing; the plots are imaginative and complex, fairy tales for grown-ups; Mrs Bradley, the psychiatrist detective, is one of the true Great Detectives; and they're very warm, human books.  The detection is not always very strong, but, at her best, GM can invent clues and misdirect the reader with the best of them (cf Saltmarsh, Death at the Opera, Brazen Tongue).

  

  

  •   The Greek Coffin Mystery (Ellery Queen, 1932)
  •   The Tragedy of X (Queen, 1932)
  •   The Adventures of Ellery Queen (Queen, 1934)

  

  As you know, I'm not a great EQ fan, but some of them are brilliant.  Tragedy of X (not an EQ, but one originally published under a pseudonym, with a megalomaniac retired actor as sleuth) is easily the best.  A very long (350 pages of small print), very complex, and very involving pure detective story, with murders on New York transport (tram, ferry, train), and with one of those divine thunderbolts of revelation that every detective story fan hopes for.  Greek Coffin is also great, and many of the Adventures are brilliant.

  

  

  •   A Judgement in Stone (Ruth Rendell, 1977)
  •   A Sleeping Life (Rendell, 1978)
  •   An Unkindness of Ravens (Rendell, 1985)
  •   Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (Rendell, 1992)

  

  Although I went off Rendell and hated her with a passion after reading A Demon in My View, I've been rediscovering her recently.  In some ways, she reminds me of Gladys Mitchell - there's the same relish for the macabre and incongruous, and the MR James / Grimm fairytale atmosphere which means they can be read and reread as good fiction, rather than just as detective stories.  She has a complete mastery of atmosphere and storytelling, and a lot of the plots are original, convincing and often disturbing.  Some of the psychological thrillers (Demon, Live Flesh) are pretty nasty, but others (A Judgement in Stone, which gives away the whole plot in the first paragraph, but increases in tension; Master of the Moor, The Tree of Hands) are extraordinary.  It's like Wilde / Strauss's Salome: the ability to make abhorrent behaviour and murderous obsession understandable, and to really involve the audience, so that they want to stop the characters from destroying themselves.  A lot  of the Wexfords are excellent mysteries, with surprising solutions (abnormal psychology and hidden relationships rather like many of the post-WWII Carrs) and clever clueing.  The short stories are also superb: just the right length to have an impact, and with inevitable twists.  "The Wrong Category" is a masterpiece of misdirection, and "The Vinegar Mother" a triumph of atmosphere.  (And that's a hymn of praise I wouldn't have sung a couple of years ago!)

  

 

  •   Unnatural Death (Dorothy L Sayers, 1927)
  •   The Documents in the Case (Sayers, 1929)
  •   Murder Must Advertise (Sayers, 1933)
  •   The Nine Tailors (Sayers, 1934)

  

  Most of Sayers's books are superb, but not the usual suspects: Strong Poison has a great method, but is a bit light, and Gaudy Night, although much better than I thought, and Busman's Honeymoon do have some flaws.  Who wants to know that Wimsey involves John Donne in his love-making?  (Busy old fool, unruly sunne, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windowes, and through curtaines calle on us?  Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck...  / Come, seeling night, / Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day!)  Sayers's best books have a really memorable method, and an original setting (an advertising agency, an East Anglican church), good characterisation and a nice sense of wit - and something to say about responsibility, guilt and innocence.  Nine Tailors is probably Sayers's best, although really all of her books (except Clouds of Witness, which is very early and light) are good.

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