This is a must read article for those who are new to detective
mystery books and looking for somewhere to start. Here I list the three
great giants of this genre and why they deserve their spot.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle must top any list of mystery authors. His Sherlock Holmes, though created in the Victorian era, is still a household name, an icon for all subsequent fictional heroes in this genre. Aided by his bumbling sidekick Dr Watson, from his famous London apartment Holmes solves innumerable mysterious dilemmas brought to him by desperate suppliants, from Government ministers to humble damsels in distress, and time and time again he foils the plots of his archenemy, the criminal mastermind, Moriarty. The brooding intellectual genius of Holmes, the unfailing solver of all mysteries, is made more humane by his inept violin-playing, his harmless drug-addiction and the honest common-sense complementarity and physicality of his Watson companion.
Doyle himself was born into an Irish Catholic Edinburgh family in 1859; he attributed much of his love of literature to the fantastic stories told to him when young by his mother Mary; later he even believed in the actual existence of fairies and other such imaginary beings. He qualified as a doctor and the logical order and method of Holmes in solving his cases came in no small part from Doyle's admiration of one of his professors in medical college, just as his bumbling Watson came from his actual experience of some medical colleagues. But in fact from an early age his real talent lay in imaginative writing. So, though his service as a doctor in the Boer war earned him a knighthood, he soon abandoned medicine for literary pursuits. Initially at least, he saw his Holmes novels and short stories as pot boilers for his more serious novels and poems. The latter were in many ways the complete opposite of the detective works, they reflected more his love of the supernatural, the esoteric and the exotic. It was, however, the Holmes works that the public craved. Those works made Doyle a very rich man, won him international fame, and guaranteed his enduring legacy. For he had created a rich new genre of detective mystery writing which Agatha Christie and others have carried on successfully into our own era.
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie carried on Doyle's legacy but in a more varied and modern style. Her main detective, Poirot, also relies on order and logical method to solve the invariably complex cases foisted on him by desperate clients, and he has a Watson-like companion and narrator, the redoubtable Hastings. But Christie, though still quintessentially British, moves beyond the insularity of Doyle to encompass the wider world, as her titles make clear: Murder on the Orient Express; Death on the Nile, They came to Baghdad. Yet in her other great sleuth, Miss Marple, and aged spinster from a small English village, she not only changes the gender of the traditional detective hero, but also seems to become totally parochial. I say seems for her thesis is that all the world is embodied in the local. And it is the universal applicability of her works that make them so popular, that and the unmatched ingenuity of her plots, which keeps us guessing to the end. It's this, and the continuing world-wide popularity of the genre, that has enabled her to sell 2 billion copies of her works world-wide, translated into 45 languages, second only in sales to the Bible and Shakespeare.
Raymond Chandler
If Doyle and Christie are very British, Chandler is very American and carried the genre to that continent, and to its world of Hollywood movies, with crucial variations. He might be said to be the founder of the American hard-boiled detective of Film Noir and Pulp Fiction fame. He evolved this style from reading pulp fiction stories while unemployed during the great depression. He was drawn to it because he found it forceful and honest, if somewhat crude. Certainly, Philip Marlow, his slightly dark and downbeat private eye, 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, consorting with the lowlife as well as the society dames. In this mode Chandler's novels The Big Sleep, Farewell my Lovely, and The Long Goodbye, are seen as having some merit as modern American literature in its infancy. And through the movies, he helped write the screenplay for the classic Double Indemnity and even collaborated with Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train, he brought the genre to an even wider audience. This is why, before his death in 1959, he became president of the mystery detective association of America, he had become its exemplar par excellence.
To conclude the above writers could be called the three great giants of the Mystery genre but they're certainly not the only writers of merit. Daphne Du Maurier and Joseph Conrad to name but a few are also worthy of exploration. I hope you find the same satisfaction in reading their works that I have.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle must top any list of mystery authors. His Sherlock Holmes, though created in the Victorian era, is still a household name, an icon for all subsequent fictional heroes in this genre. Aided by his bumbling sidekick Dr Watson, from his famous London apartment Holmes solves innumerable mysterious dilemmas brought to him by desperate suppliants, from Government ministers to humble damsels in distress, and time and time again he foils the plots of his archenemy, the criminal mastermind, Moriarty. The brooding intellectual genius of Holmes, the unfailing solver of all mysteries, is made more humane by his inept violin-playing, his harmless drug-addiction and the honest common-sense complementarity and physicality of his Watson companion.
Doyle himself was born into an Irish Catholic Edinburgh family in 1859; he attributed much of his love of literature to the fantastic stories told to him when young by his mother Mary; later he even believed in the actual existence of fairies and other such imaginary beings. He qualified as a doctor and the logical order and method of Holmes in solving his cases came in no small part from Doyle's admiration of one of his professors in medical college, just as his bumbling Watson came from his actual experience of some medical colleagues. But in fact from an early age his real talent lay in imaginative writing. So, though his service as a doctor in the Boer war earned him a knighthood, he soon abandoned medicine for literary pursuits. Initially at least, he saw his Holmes novels and short stories as pot boilers for his more serious novels and poems. The latter were in many ways the complete opposite of the detective works, they reflected more his love of the supernatural, the esoteric and the exotic. It was, however, the Holmes works that the public craved. Those works made Doyle a very rich man, won him international fame, and guaranteed his enduring legacy. For he had created a rich new genre of detective mystery writing which Agatha Christie and others have carried on successfully into our own era.
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie carried on Doyle's legacy but in a more varied and modern style. Her main detective, Poirot, also relies on order and logical method to solve the invariably complex cases foisted on him by desperate clients, and he has a Watson-like companion and narrator, the redoubtable Hastings. But Christie, though still quintessentially British, moves beyond the insularity of Doyle to encompass the wider world, as her titles make clear: Murder on the Orient Express; Death on the Nile, They came to Baghdad. Yet in her other great sleuth, Miss Marple, and aged spinster from a small English village, she not only changes the gender of the traditional detective hero, but also seems to become totally parochial. I say seems for her thesis is that all the world is embodied in the local. And it is the universal applicability of her works that make them so popular, that and the unmatched ingenuity of her plots, which keeps us guessing to the end. It's this, and the continuing world-wide popularity of the genre, that has enabled her to sell 2 billion copies of her works world-wide, translated into 45 languages, second only in sales to the Bible and Shakespeare.
Raymond Chandler
If Doyle and Christie are very British, Chandler is very American and carried the genre to that continent, and to its world of Hollywood movies, with crucial variations. He might be said to be the founder of the American hard-boiled detective of Film Noir and Pulp Fiction fame. He evolved this style from reading pulp fiction stories while unemployed during the great depression. He was drawn to it because he found it forceful and honest, if somewhat crude. Certainly, Philip Marlow, his slightly dark and downbeat private eye, 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, consorting with the lowlife as well as the society dames. In this mode Chandler's novels The Big Sleep, Farewell my Lovely, and The Long Goodbye, are seen as having some merit as modern American literature in its infancy. And through the movies, he helped write the screenplay for the classic Double Indemnity and even collaborated with Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train, he brought the genre to an even wider audience. This is why, before his death in 1959, he became president of the mystery detective association of America, he had become its exemplar par excellence.
To conclude the above writers could be called the three great giants of the Mystery genre but they're certainly not the only writers of merit. Daphne Du Maurier and Joseph Conrad to name but a few are also worthy of exploration. I hope you find the same satisfaction in reading their works that I have.
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