Ten Indispensable Mysteries

The first temptation is to call them The Ten Best Mysteries of All Time or The Ten Greatest Mysteries. On the other end of the spectrum, the modest end, I could call them My Ten Favorite Mysteries. But Ten Indispensable Mysteries, I think, is an assertion I'm ready and willing to defend. There's plenty I haven't read, and a lot of it I'm sure is fabulous, so I'd be bluffing if I claimed these were the Best or the Greatest. Too, I can't really say that they represent the full breadth and history of the genre. But these ten books are so good, so thoroughly admirable, so fine an expression of what the genre can be, that I truly believe that anyone who hasn't read them has not experienced the full flowering of the mystery novel.

So here they are.


1. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler--
Forget The Big Sleep. This is Chandler's masterpiece. Pitch-perfect wisecracking, a beautiful evocation of post-war L.A.'s glamorous corruption, and Philip Marlowe in top form as the world-weary white knight.

2. A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke--
Arguably the best in Burke's superlative Dave Robicheaux series, set in Louisiana. His characters are walking firestorms of passion and twisted history, his prose is lush and vivid, and Robicheaux's internal landscape is a stern, elegant one.


3. North of Montana by April Smith--
A virtually perfect mystery, about an ambitious female FBI agent investigating the murder of a cousin she never knew she had. The writing is crisp but literary in quality, and the resonances of the heroine's complicated life mesh beautifully with the intricacies of the plot. The last scene is a gorgeous culmination of the book's main threads, simply the best finale I've ever read.


4. Monstrum by Donald James--
Oddly, this novel of a grim future Russia, ravaged by civil war and stalked by a horrific serial killer, has a bit of a wry touch. Its narrator, a Moscow detective whose ex-wife was a general on the wrong side in the war, struggles with corruption, incompetence, and a bloody-minded Siamese cat as he hunts for a truly fiendish killer. A unique voice, a disturbingly plausible setting, and a riveting plot make this one memorable and just a lot of fun.


5. The Game of Thirty by William Kotzwinkle--
Kotzwinkle has written, in my opinion, some pretty atrocious stuff. So this mystery, a clever, stylish New York P.I. novel that revolves around an ancient Egyptian board game, came as a huge and pleasant surprise. It has just the right mix of sparkle and grime, perfectly paced and carried along by a fresh, intelligent cast of characters.

6. The Cavanaugh Quest by Thomas Gifford--
A Minneapolis writer is arm-twisted into investigating the suicide of a neighbor, and then finds himself pulled into a dysfunctional romance with the neighbor's ex-wife. The suicide turns out to be the prelude to a long series of murders, as long-ago crimes send shock waves down to the present. A unique, thoughtful dark romance.

7. Mystic River by Dennis Lehane--
Some books don't fit any of the pigeonholes that have been constructed for the genre. Maybe theat means they are literature not crime novels, but I am not giving this one away without a fight. It's a modern urban epic of crime, guilt, and vengeance, compulsively readable but resonating with unpleasant truth. A quantum leap above Lehane's Patrick Kenzie series, which I would have said was about as good as it gets in crime fiction.

8. Roman Blood by Steven Saylor--
The first and best book in the Roma Sub Rosa series, starring Gordianus the Finder, a private investigator operating in the very mean streets of ancient Rome. Saylor's knowledge of Roman history is impeccable, but more importantly, his skill at turning historical characters (in this case, the orator Cicero) into well-rounded, compelling characters is magical.


9. The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman--
An elegant, richly atmospheric novel about a young woman who returns to teach the classics at a private girl's school she herself attended as a student, and where three of her best friends committed suicide by drowning. Unfortunately (well, not for the reader...) it's not long before the drownings start again. A perfectly realized thriller in the Hitchcock vein--creepy in a pleasant, cerebral kind of way.


10. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--
Wilkie Collins? Unreadable. John Buchan? Repugnant. But Doyle is evergreen. More than a century later, these stories are still crisp, elegant, and (if you've been lucky enough to forget the solutions) deliciously mystifying. Somehow Holmes is completely of his time, a paragon of Victorian virtue and rationalism, and yet timelessly entertaining.