Listomania: The Daily Telegraph's Great Crime Writers

From G K Chesterton to Elmore Leonard The Daily Telegraph presents a list of of its favourite crime writers of all time

After a debate that left senior members of the Telegraph's literary staff with pulled hair, black eyes and, in one case, an infected bite, we this week present our list of the 50 great crime writers of all time.

We wanted to compile a list of writers we had, jointly and severally, loved. We wanted to include writers like Dash Hammett, who brought something new and exciting to the genre; like Elmore Leonard, who turns an old trick in it with incomparable style; and like Poe, who invented it. We did not, except incidentally, take into account popularity.

Who, we asked ourselves finally, are the crime writers who can actually write? We believe any serious reader will profit from acquaintance with any of the writers on this list.

GK Chesterton (1874-1936)

The most fluent journalist of his generation, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was also a master of the detective story. Father Brown - his sceptical and worldly-wise priest - featured in dozens of exquisite entertainments. Settle into a comfy chair and enjoy. 
Read: The Complete Father Brown (1986)

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

Conan Doyle's pipe-smoking detective is so well known that Sherlock has become a synonym for sleuth. He never said the catchphrase; the illustrator gave him the hat; continuity errors abound… but he's brilliant.
Read: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Poe was a man of formidable talents - not least of which, sadly, was drinking himself to death. Before that, though, he gave us fiction's first detective, in Auguste Dupin, and hairiest murderer, in an orang-utan. 
Read: The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)

Ed McBain (1926-2005)

As well as writing the script for Hitchcock's The Birds, McBain (real name: Evan Hunter) more or less invented the police procedural. The detectives of Isola's 87th Precinct wise-cracked for half a century, and their spare style was the prime influence on Hill Street Blues. 
Read: King's Ransom (2003)

Kyril Bonfiglioli (1929-1985)

A raffish former art dealer, Bonfiglioli created - in Charlie Mortdecai - an antihero (also a raffish art dealer) of irresistible charm. Charlie has the manner of a demented Bertie Wooster and the morals of a polecat. Great titles, too. 
Read: The Mortdecai Trilogy (1991)

James Ellroy (b. 1948)

Ellroy's labyrinthine novels chart a West Coast underworld of corruption and evil, played out against real historical events. Bent cops, nightsticks, psychopaths and seductresses. Makes The Silence of the Lambs resemble a vicar's tea party.
Read: The Black Dahlia (1987)

Janwillem van der Wetering (b. 1931)

The capers of Grijpstra and de Gier, aka The Amsterdam Cops, are oddly appealing. One plays the drums; the other the flute. They frequent canals. There's a cat. Unique and very Dutch. 
Read: Outsider in Amsterdam (1975)

Carl Hiaasen (b. 1953)

A master of the comic crime novel, Hiaasen patrols Florida's Everglades. His villains are big business, petty crimes and That Mouse. Skink, a feral former Florida governor who lives off roadkill, often features. 
Read: Double Whammy (1987)

Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961)

It’s a cinch to argue that Hammett was the most influential stylist of the past century and probably the father of the modern literary novel. After honing his style on pulp magazines, he famously proved that high literary art was not only possible, but best achieved, through spare rather than florid or heavily mannered prose.

He influenced Raymond Chandler, who then inspired generations of writers to explore the lyrical possibilities of laconic, muscular writing while instinctively rejecting popular pre-Hammett styles as dull or overwrought. Hammett created revolutionary models for the morally ambiguous hero (Sam Spade) and the equal partnership of modern marriage (Nick and Nora Charles) now so universal that we have forgotten our debt to him.

Reprinted in 2004, his Continental Op stories proved so stunningly fresh that the 1920s hero could have carried a Blackberry without raising eyebrows unduly.
Read: The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Dan Kavanagh (b. 1946)

In the 1980s, the shady, elusive Kavanagh - crime-writing alter-ego of Julian Barnes - produced four grimy, winningly absurd tales starring Duffy, a bisexual ex-copper with a heart of coal.
Read: The Duffy Omnibus (1991)

Margery Allingham (1904-1966)

Often taken as one of a trio with Marsh and Sayers, Allingham has a pace and frivolity all her own. She created a world that manages to be reassuring yet fraught with danger.
Read: The Tiger in the Smoke (1952)

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Like his friend Wilkie Collins, Dickens was obsessed with crime. Bleak House's Inspector Bucket is one of the first detectives in fiction. It's a pity that The Mystery of Edwin Drood will forever remain unsolved. 
Read: Bleak House (1852-3)

Georges Simenon (1903-1989)

Fabulously prolific Belgian master, said to have schtupped more than 10,000 ladies and written more than 300 novels. We don’t know how long he spent on each lady, but he reckoned to write 60 pages of fiction a day.

His greatest creation was Maigret, an unassuming detective with a brain like a sponge and the quiet moral determination of a true hero. Other detectives deduce; Maigret absorbs.

The best of the novels drop Simenon’s detective into a social environment in which, by doing very little, he unravels a whole world of secrets and interconnections.

So it is in The Yellow Dog, in which a small town in the gloomy off-season gives up its private passions one by one to the detective’s patient observation. A whole school of modern detectives still walks in Maigret’s large footprints.
Read: The Yellow Dog (1931)

Agatha Christie (1890-1976)

Christie did not have the purest prose style and she played hard and fast with the genre's rules but in Marple and Poirot, she invented two of our most enduring literary characters. 
Read: Peril at End House (1932)

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889)

The Moonstone established the genre's ground rules: red herrings; a long list of suspects; the man from Scotland Yard, and a nod to a pressing social issue, in this case opium addiction. 
Read: The Moonstone (1868)

Jonathan Latimer (1906-1983)

Admired for his William Crane novels of the 1930s, which parodied hard-boiled crime fiction. Where most private eyes drink like fish with little effect, boozy Crane is more often found sleeping it off than detecting.
Read: The Fifth Grave (1941)

Ruth Rendell (b. 1930)

Ruth Rendell, the creator of Inspector Wexford, is one of Britain's best-loved writers. She brought psychological realism and darker themes to crime fiction in novels such as Talking to Strange Men and Live Flesh. 
Read: The Water's Lovely (2006)

Ngaio Marsh (c. 1895-1982)

A New Zealander who created a quintessentially English detective, the dishy Roderick Alleyn, who featured in 32 sparkling novels. Female fans' hearts were broken when Alleyn eventually married.
Read: Vintage Murder (1937)

Benjamin Black (b. 1945)

Black's two novels set in 1950s Dublin, in which lumbering pathologist Quirk investigates suspicious deaths, are bracingly bleak. Also known to the police as John Banville.
Read: Christine Falls (2006)

John Dickson Carr (1906-1977)

The master of the "impossible crime", he claimed to have come up with 80 versions of the locked-room mystery, usually solved by his Falstaffian sleuth Dr. Gideon Fell. Also wrote as Carter Dickson.
Read: The Hollow Man (1935)

Michael Innes (1906-1994)

An Oxford don who wrote inventive crime fantasies. Crooks are more likely to get caught by quoting from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam than by fingerprints when erudite copper John Appleby is about.
Read: The Weight of the Evidence (1943)

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)

He may have forgotten to tell us who murdered the chauffeur in The Big Sleep, but otherwise Chandler can't be faulted. Every reluctant step Philip Marlowe takes through California's mean streets carries him further into legend.
Read: Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990)

The most famous of this Swiss author's chilling novellas is The Pledge, in which a policeman finds his Holmes-like powers are useless for dealing with the real world's random brutality. 
Read: The Pledge (1958)

Michael Gilbert (1912-2006)

The stories featuring Mr Calder and Mr Behrens, two seemingly benign old boys who are actually ruthless secret service assassins, are examples of this underrated writer's unnervingly civilised approach to horrific violence.
Read: Even Murderers Take Holidays and other Mysteries (2007)

Donald Westlake (1933-2008)

The king of the comic caper, whose novels usually feature amiable criminals bungling their way into sticky situations. The novels he writes as "Richard Stark", featuring the amoral thief Parker, are darker fare. 
Read: What's So Funny? (2007)

Colin Bateman (b. 1962)

Any appearance by Bateman's regular protagonist, journalist Dan Starkey, heralds the imminent death in amusing fashion of half the population of Belfast. Comic thrillers that are actually comic and thrilling. 
Read: Wild About Harry (2001)

Frances Fyfield (b. 1948)

Fyfield emerged as a rival to Minette Walters when publishers in the mid-1990s were obsessed with grim, cod-psychological nasties inspired by Ruth Rendell. She's relaxed into a more comfortable format. 
Read: The Art of Drowning (2006)

Reginald Hill (b. 1936)

Everyone thinks they know Hill through the TV series "inspired" by his creations Dalziel and Pascoe - to the extent that they miss his writerly flourishes and teasing way with readers. He's a victim of his own success.
Read: Good Morning Midnight (2004)

Andrea Camilleri (b. 1925)

Camilleri's writing suits his hero Inspector Montalbano, a Sicilian with a broad sense of humour. Camilleri's real subject is the state of Sicily, but his characters are vivid and their dilemmas eternal.
Read: The Patience of the Spider (2007)

Henning Mankell (b. 1948)

Each book finishes with fatty Wallander crashing about the bushes in a tracksuit, but the Swede's existential misery is delightful and every novel is absorbing and satisfying. 
Read: Sidetracked (1999)

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995)

No one reads Patricia Highsmith for consolation: there is rarely a happy ending in which order is restored, and her complex, morally ambiguous characters are just as likely to escape justice as to receive it.

Highsmith’s career was kick-started by Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film version of her 1950 novel, Strangers on a Train, but Tom Ripley (who also appeared on screen, in The Talented Mr Ripley) is her most infamous creation, and he appeared in five of her novels, chilly and scheming and repellent.

There is a worrying strata of authentic darkness that underpins her work, and it is no surprise that she lived a peculiar, isolated life, during which she preferred the company of snails to humans.
Read: The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)

James Lee Burke (b. 1936)

A decade ago, Lee Burke gave the gritty lyricism of his series about alkie Louisiana cop Dave Robicheaux full rein and created a one-man revival of Southern Gothic writing. One of America's finest novelists in any field.
Read: Black Cherry Blues (1989)

Jim Thompson (1906-1977)

There was no more brutal and brilliant exponent of old-style pulp than the “Dime Store Dostoevsky” – Jim Thompson. Thompson churned out more than 30 novels in the course of his drunken, borderline criminal life.

Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me are both narrated by murderously unhinged small-town lawmen, who mask their moral vacuity with goofy homespun wisdom. The Grifters shows the noose tightening nastily on small-time cons. The Getaway follows a viperous Bonnie-and- Clyde-style pair of robbers on the run, pitching them finally into a chilling hell of their own making.

Thompson’s novels are set, largely, in a world where there are no good guys. Dark as hell, his books are all the darker for being funny.
Read: The Getaway (1959)

Walter Mosley (b. 1952)

Mosley's Easy Rawlins is a classic film noir gumshoe with the twist that he's a black war vet at the dawn of the civil rights crusade.
Read: Devil in a Blue Dress (1991)

Denise Mina (b. 1966)

In Mina's Garnethill novels, an ex-mental patient clinging to sanity in the underbelly of Glasgow isn't as grim as it sounds. Her wit and warmth render the trials of her heroine oddly life-affirming.
Read: Garnethill (1999)

Steig Larsson (1954-2004)

A crusading Swedish journalist who died in 2004, leaving the manuscripts of three thrillers. They have received high praise and the first volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has just been published here.
Read: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008)

Ronald Knox (1888-1957)

Knox gained fame as a Roman Catholic priest but made a huge contribution to Golden Age crime. Miles Bredon (Dorothy L Sayers stole the surname for Peter Wimsey) is an insurance investigator in The Three Taps; there are five other books. He coined the 10 commandments of the detective novel in 1929 and was later reduced to translating the Bible.
Read: The Viaduct Murder (1925)

EC Bentley (1875-1956)

Inventor of the Clerihew and a schoolmate of GK Chesterton. Trent's Last Case (1913) is a landmark in detective fiction because it breaks several of the form's cardinal rules.
Read: Trent's Last Case (1913)

Lawrence Block (b. 1938)

Block shows a love of the cosy locked-room school in his Burglar series. His genius is in full flower in the Matt Scudder series, about a hard-boiled ex-cop investigating sleazy crimes.
Read: All the Flowers Are Dying (2005)

Edmund Crispin (1921-1978)

Bohemian schoolmaster Bruce Montgomery (aka Crispin) spoofed post-war crime fiction with great larkiness. His dotty professor and amateur sleuth, Gervase Fen, even admits he's a fictional character. 
Read: Holy Disorders (1945)

William McIlvanney (b. 1936)

McIlvanney, a considerable mainstream novelist, has set three crime novels in Glasgow: Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties. They probably inspired the TV series Taggart, but are far more intelligent and subtle.
Read: Laidlaw (1977)

George V Higgins (1939-1999)

Elmore Leonard acknowledges Higgins as his major influence. His books are almost all in (foul-mouthed, funny, well observed, poetically cadenced) dialogue. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the best known but none are duds.
Read: The Rat on Fire (1981)

Dorothy L Sayers (1893-1957)

Sayers was responsible, with Agatha Christie, for fixing in the public mind the idea (demonstrably false) that women are particularly good at crime writing. Unlike Christie, Sayers was. She was good at writing, full stop.

She translated Dante’s Inferno when it was little-known, except to specialists, and wrote a radical radio play about Christ which caused an outcry. Sayers had her faults. She was donnish and high-jinxy to a degree which might have made even other members of the High Oxford school (Michael Innes, Edmund Crispin) blush.

In Clouds of Witness she alludes to a fairly obscure quotation. Lower-class characters drop their aitches left, right and centre, while Lord Peter is perhaps too much of a good thing, even as snobbish wishfulfilment.

Some think the solution to The Nine Tailors is a swizz; but the genius of the missing item in Five Red Herrings is, on its own, enough to confirm her greatness.
Read: Five Red Herrings (1931)

Anthony Boucher (1911-68)

The revered US crime fiction critic also created characters such as Nick Noble, a former cop who props up a bar while his ex-colleagues bring him their trickiest cases.
Read: The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940)

Mickey Spillane (1918-2006 )

Creator of brutish but honest private dick Mike Hammer, who, by bashing the bejesus out of crooks, helped make Spillane one of the best-selling writers of the 20th century.
Read: I, the Jury (1947)

James Grady (b. 1949)

His thrillers set ordinary people in dangerous situations engendered by government greed and corruption. His first novel, Six Days of the Condor, was made into a film. 
Read: Six Days of the Condor (1974)

George Pelecanos (b. 1957)

The pulp fiction bard of the sleaziest side of Washington DC. The capital's rigid firearms laws generate imaginatively grisly alternatives to the traditional shoot-out.
Read: The Big Blowdown (1996)

Robert Crais (b. 1954)

Just when you think there can't be a new take on the old "PI with a mildly psychotic sidekick" formula, Crais proves you right. Elvis Cole is a homage, but also a labour of literary love.
Read: The Watchman (2007)

John Lawton (b. 1949)

Lawton immerses a newspaper baron's son, Inspector Troy, in the scandals of post-war Britain. His skewed social history is utterly absorbing. 
Read: Black Out (1995)

Elmore Leonard (b. 1925)

Leonard owes much to George V Higgins, but his snappy dialogue, learned as a copy-writer, slick prose and plotting are instantly recognisable. "If it sounds like writing," he says,"I rewrite it."
Read: Maximum Bob (1991)