A choice of classic crime fiction

My involvement with crime and mystery fiction started when I was four. The first book I remember reading for myself was Hurrah for Little Noddy. As Enid Blyton aficionados will know, this is the second in the series about a self-absorbed wooden doll. It’s a thrilling tale about a massive car heist (those pesky goblins), involving a red herring, a car chase, wrongful arrest (oh poor Noddy), a stupid police officer and the intervention of a gifted amateur (Big Ears’s finest moment). Drop everything and re-read it.

Much of Blyton’s prodigious output is crime fiction writ small. I have a theory that its imprint on tender minds is largely responsible for the flourishing condition of British crime fiction over the past 40-odd years. Blyton led me naturally to other authors. When I was eight, my father gave me his copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with the prophetic words: ‘I think you might like this now’.

What follows is an entirely personal selection of the crime novels that not only shaped my taste for the genre, for better or worse, but which I’ve also found bear re-reading. When I graduated from Blyton, I moved seamlessly to Agatha Christie. The best of her short and deceptively simple novels are classics of the genre. The first time you read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) or And Then There Were None (1939), you skim through the pages to discover who the murderer is. Then you can give yourself the pleasure of re-reading, just to see how Christie works her magic.

From there I found it a short step to the slightly more cerebral pleasures of Dorothy L. Sayers. Her splendidly unbelievable protagonist Lord Peter Wimsey develops during the series from a Woosterish detective to a lovelorn, angst-ridden neurotic.