This year, I discovered Agatha Christie. A few years back, when I was temporarily advised bed rest for a month, my sis loaned me a collection of Hercule Poirot short stories.
I was always a Sherlock Holmes fan and really enjoyed the logical detective work. Hercule Poirot felt like just like a pretentious quirky old man, making denouements based on evidence that is flimsy and tenuous at best.
This year, I came across the novels, and boy are they different! The novels give more space for characters to develop and for us to observe the proceedings and deduce clues. Each book felt more like a Whodunit game wrought as a novel. I tried to play detective as the story proceeded. Often the ending was radically different from what I expected, a few were a letdown and a bit lacking in proper evidence. But always, there are entertaining and I had so much fun and I was even right once or twice.
Of course they were written a long time back, but I am happy to discover them now.
If HN community can give me point to even better literature in the same vein, it would be heaven!
Sherlock and Poirot are great detective genres. I'm not sure if they really have parallels.
The French people however love their Inspector Maigret (by Georges Simenon). The Maigret books are apparently some of the best selling books in the Francophone world of all time. Inspector Maigret however is more procedural, and doesn't go for climatic reveals and does not have the flawed omniscient genius character that most of us are instinctively attracted to.
On the opposite end of spectrum, you might enjoy Arsene Lupin (by Maurice Leblanc), a gentleman-thief.
I’ve been gradually working through producing the Arsène Lupin stories and they’re fabulous, especially when you include his relations to Herlock Sholmes :) Libre Arsène ebooks I’ve produced so far (the remaining PD corpus is gradually following):
The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar
I would say that Maigret is a kind of psychological detective : even if there are clues and detective work, his main characteristic is that he tries to get to the bottom of the personnalities he encounters, what motives drive the criminal and who they really are, so he is more concerned about the "why" than the "how".
Margery Allingham was active at about the same time (her last book was in the '60s), and ought to be much better known. Her writing is great, she's a really sharp observer of human psychology, but there's always a lightness to her stories.
She wrote a long series centred around the character of Albert Campion, and the books evolve as the times changed. The very first books are murder mysteries, but have a 39 Steps feel to them, then they evolve into Golden Age mysteries, and the post-war novels become more grounded crime novels, although never really bleak. The very last book, set in the 1960s, has a touch of science fiction.
- Bernie Gunther series by Philip Kerr (March Violets is the first)
- Marcus Didius Falco series by Lindsey Davis (The Silver Pigs is the first)
They may be a little noirish for your tastes (more focused on character and society) but I loved the detailed historical settings and the level of depth to the detective characters. They're also both still propelled by a mystery / solving a crime.
I was always a Sherlock Holmes fan and really enjoyed the logical detective work. Hercule Poirot felt like just like a pretentious quirky old man, making denouements based on evidence that is flimsy and tenuous at best.
This year, I came across the novels, and boy are they different! The novels give more space for characters to develop and for us to observe the proceedings and deduce clues. Each book felt more like a Whodunit game wrought as a novel. I tried to play detective as the story proceeded. Often the ending was radically different from what I expected, a few were a letdown and a bit lacking in proper evidence. But always, there are entertaining and I had so much fun and I was even right once or twice.
Of course they were written a long time back, but I am happy to discover them now.
If HN community can give me point to even better literature in the same vein, it would be heaven!