Genre Hub

Crime & Mystery

Golden age whodunits, hard-boiled noir, modern psychological crime fiction, and procedural thrillers. The genre that never stops reinventing itself.

NoirCosy MysteryPolice ProceduralPsychologicalGolden Age

Reading List

The Crime & Mystery Top 100

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The essential crime & mystery reads, curated and ranked. How many have you read?

And Then There Were None

Agatha Christie

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Arthur Conan Doyle

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Agatha Christie

The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett

Murder on the Orient Express

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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Go deeper

Essential Crime & Mystery

The golden age: Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None remains the best-selling mystery novel ever written. Start there, then Murder on the Orient Express. These are architectural masterpieces of plotting.

For hard-boiled noir: Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep established the template. For modern noir, James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential or Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series.

For literary crime: Tana French is the best crime writer working today. In the Woods and The Likeness are particularly stunning — they read like literary fiction that happens to have a murder in them.

For Scandinavian crime: Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opened the door, but Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole series and Camilla Läckberg's Fjällbacka Murders are equally compelling.

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