4/23/2014

Amazon's 100 Mysteries

Amazon has a recent list of "100 Mysteries and Thrillers To Read In Your Lifetime".  Here are the ones I've read:


  • Caleb Carr, The Alienist
  • Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None
  • James Clavell, Shogun
  • Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain
  • Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
  • Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
  • James Ellroy, L.A. Confidential
  • Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal
  • Dashiel Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
  • Thomas Harris, Red Dragon
  • Franz Kafka, The Trial
  • Stephen King, Misery
  • Donald Sobol, Encyclopedia Brown
  • Mickey Spillane, I, The Jury
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
  • Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance
  • Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
  • Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me


There were books by additional authors (James Lee Burke, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, John MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, James Patterson, and Donald Westlake) that I've read some (sometimes a lot) of their work but don't remember for sure if I ever read those specific titles.  (If Kiss The Girls was James Patterson's first book, yes, I read it, and yes, that's why I've never read a second Patterson book.  *ka-zing!*)  A lot of those books were made into movies that I do remember seeing.

The Amazon list tries to provide a cross-section of various subgenres in the mystery/thriller line, so someone who's never read any who tries blind picks from the list is likely to have a roller-coaster ride, from puzzle mysteries to procedurals to noir to historicals.  But it's an interesting list.

The list includes one of Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden detective-with-magic books,so I was a bit surprised that Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel wasn't included to represent the SF end of that spectrum.  Other omissions will probably come to mind later.

No comments: