The Top Three Detective Mystery Writers of All Time!

This is a must-read article for those who are new to detective mystery books and looking for a place to start. Here I list the three great giants of this genre and why they deserve their place.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle should top any list of mystery writers. The Sherlock Holmes of him, though created in Victorian times, remains a household name, an icon for all subsequent fictional heroes in this genre. With the help of his clumsy partner, Dr. Watson, from his famous London apartment, Holmes solves countless mysterious dilemmas posed to him by desperate supplicants, from government ministers to lowly damsels in distress, and time and time again thwarts their plans. of his archenemy, the intellectual author of the crime. , Moriarty. Holmes’ brooding intellectual genius, the infallible solver of all mysteries, is made more human by his ineptitude at playing the violin, his harmless drug addiction, and the honest, common-sense complementarity and physique of his partner Watson.

Doyle himself was born into an Irish Catholic family in Edinburgh in 1859; He attributed much of his love for literature to the fantastic stories that his mother, María de él, told him as a young man; he later he even believed in the real existence of fairies and other similar imaginary beings. He graduated as a doctor, and Holmes’s logical order and method of solving his cases came in large part from Doyle’s admiration for one of his professors in medical school, just as his clumsy Watson came from his actual experience with some medical colleagues. But in fact, from an early age his real talent lay in imaginative writing. So, although his service as a doctor in the Boer War earned him a knighthood, he soon gave up medicine for literary pursuits. Initially, at least, he saw his Holmes novels and short stories as cauldrons for his more serious novels and poems. The latter were in many ways the complete opposite of detective works, reflecting more of his love for the supernatural, the esoteric, and the exotic. However, it was Holmes’s works that the public longed for. Those works made Doyle a very wealthy man, brought him international fame, and ensured his lasting legacy. Because he had created a rich new genre of whodunit that Agatha Christie and others have successfully brought to our age.

Christie Agatha

Agatha Christie continued Doyle’s legacy but with a more varied and modern style. Her lead detective, Poirot, also relies on order and logical method to solve the invariably complex cases foisted on her by desperate clients, and she has a Watson-like partner and narrator, the redoubtable Hastings. But Christie, though she remains quintessentially British, reaches beyond Doyle’s insularity to embrace the wider world, as her titles make clear: Murder on the Orient Express; Death in the Nile, They reached Baghdad. However, in the other great detective of hers, Miss Marple, and the old spinster from a small English town, she not only flips the gender of the traditional detective hero, but also seems to go downright redneck. I say that it seems that her thesis is that the whole world is embodied in the local. And it’s the universal applicability of her works that makes them so popular, that and the unrivaled ingenuity of her plots that keeps us on our toes until the very end. It is this, and the genre’s continued global popularity, that has allowed him to sell 2 billion copies of his works worldwide, translated into 45 languages, second only to the Bible and Shakespeare in sales.

Raymond Chandler

If Doyle and Christie are very British, Chandler is very American and brought the genre to that continent, and to its world of Hollywood movies, with crucial variations. You could say that he is the founder of the hardened American detective of Film Noir and Pulp Fiction fame. He developed this style from reading pulp fiction stories while unemployed during the great depression. He was drawn to it because he found it blunt and honest, if somewhat crude. Certainly Philip Marlow, the slightly dark and pessimistic private detective of his, played in the films by Humphrey Bogart, is far from the sophisticated world of Holmes or Poirot. But he is very American and very democratic, he associates with the underworld and with the ladies of high society. In this regard, Chandler’s novels The Big Sleep, Farewell my Lovely, and The Long Goodbye are considered to have some merit as modern American literature on his infancy. And through the movies, he helped pen the script for the classic Double Indemnity and even collaborated with Hitchcock on Strangers on a Train, bringing the genre to an even wider audience. Thus, before his death in 1959, he became president of the Mystery Detectives Association of America, his role model par excellence.

To conclude, the above writers could be called the three great giants of the Mystery genre, but they certainly aren’t the only writers of merit. Daphne Du Maurier and Joseph Conrad, to name a few, are also worth exploring. I hope that when reading his works you find the same satisfaction that I did.