The Big Sleep
1939 · 231 pages
A dying general among his orchids hires Philip Marlowe to settle a blackmail debt, and the job opens into pornography, missing husbands, and Los Angeles money. Chandler's sentences became an American standard.
★ 6.9
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
1892 · 213 pages
Twelve cases at 221B Baker Street, from the king undone by Irene Adler to the whistle in the night at Stoke Moran. No human character in fiction has been played by more actors.
★ 6.7
The Maltese Falcon
1929 · 217 pages
Chandler said Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley. His detective Sam Spade loses a partner, trusts nobody, and chases a black statuette worth killing for.
★ 6.5
The Hound of the Baskervilles
1902 · 124 pages
On Dartmoor a legend says a demon hound hunts the Baskervilles, and Sir Charles lies dead with paw prints beside him. Doyle sends Watson onto the moor without Holmes.
★ 6.4
And Then There Were None
1939 · 250 pages
The best-selling mystery ever written: eight guests and two servants on an island off Devon, accused by a gramophone of murders the law could not touch, then killed to a nursery rhyme.
★ 5.3
Murder on the Orient Express
1934 · 240 pages
Snow halts the Orient Express, and an American passenger is found dead in his compartment, stabbed twelve times. Poirot has no police and no laboratory, only what the other travelers tell him.
★ 5.3
Double Indemnity
1936 · 115 pages
Walter Huff sells insurance, and the wife who wants a policy on her husband starts him on the clause that pays double. Cain tells it as a confession and never slows down.
★ 5.2
Devil in a Blue Dress
1990 · 240 pages
Los Angeles, 1948. Easy Rawlins, a Black veteran fired from the aircraft plant, takes a white man's hundred dollars to find a missing woman, and Mosley rebuilds postwar Watts around the search.
★ 5.1
Red Harvest
1929 · 216 pages
Hired to clean up a Montana mining town, a nameless detective turns its gangs on each other until the streets fill with bodies. Hammett was a Pinkerton, and the coldness is not invented.
★ 5.1
A Rage in Harlem
1957 · 159 pages
Jackson, a pious Harlem hearse driver, loses his savings to a con man promising to turn tens into hundreds. Himes wrote the funniest and most violent Harlem in American crime fiction.
★ 4.9
The Chill
1964 · 279 pages
A husband hires Lew Archer to find the bride who fled their honeymoon, and the trail runs back decades into two families' history. In Macdonald's California, crimes are inherited rather than committed.
★ 4.6