The 14 Best Detective Series, and Which Book to Start With

This is the first collection of Holmes short stories, and it contains the ones that built the legend: a king being blackmailed by a photograph, a bank robbery disguised as a job for red-haired men, a stepfather and a whistle in the dark. Each runs about twenty pages, so you get a complete case in one sitting. Watson narrates, Holmes performs, and the deduction scenes still land because Doyle never lets a trick outstay its welcome.

Poirot has moved to King's Abbot to retire, badly, and the village doctor narrates while a wealthy man is killed hours after learning something he refused to share. The set-up is standard Christie: a locked study, a household of people with debts and secrets, a village that runs on gossip. What she does inside that ordinary frame is the reason writers still take this book apart line by line ninety years later, and the reason I will describe none of it here.

Captain Sam Wyndham has survived the trenches, lost his wife to influenza, and taken a job with the Imperial Police because there is nothing left for him in London. His sergeant, Surendranath Banerjee, is better at the work and outranked by the colour of his skin. The case is a proper investigation with suspects and pressure from above, and the city is not decoration: the politics of 1919 Bengal is inside the plot rather than sprinkled over it.

This is the eighth Rebus book and the one where the series stops being good and becomes serious. Rebus is sent north in disgrace, and the case pulls him from Edinburgh to Glasgow to Aberdeen and out onto a North Sea oil rig, while an old Glasgow killer who was never caught shadows the whole thing. It is longer and angrier than the earlier books, the Scotland in it is a working country with money problems, and Rebus himself is finally as complicated as the crimes.

Perveen Mistry works in her father's law firm because the bar will not let her argue in court, which turns out to be an advantage when the household in question is one no man may enter. She is executing a will for a wealthy Muslim family with three widows in purdah, and their signatures do not sit right. A death follows. Alongside the case, the book gives you Perveen's own past in Calcutta, which explains exactly why she cares this much about a woman's legal standing.

The Spains bought into a development that the crash abandoned, so their new home sits in a field of empty shells. The father and two children are dead, the mother is in intensive care, and there are holes punched through the walls of the house. Scorcher Kennedy is the squad's model of procedure and control, which is precisely why this case takes him apart. French writes crime as psychology, and this is her most frightening book because nothing supernatural is required.

The neighbours assume it is a party game, arrive with their curiosity dressed as politeness, and at the announced hour the lights go out and a gun is fired. Marple happens to be staying nearby. The setting is post-war England, where rationing and displaced people mean nobody can quite prove who they say they are, and Christie uses that beautifully: the puzzle depends on the fact that a village of strangers had been pretending to be a village of neighbours.

Ashwin Chopra has a bad heart, a forced retirement, a wife with opinions, and a boy's drowning that the station has written off as an accident. Then a truck arrives at his housing society with an elephant calf in it. The elephant is not a gimmick for long, and the case takes Chopra through the parts of Mumbai a retired policeman is no longer supposed to enter. It is warm, funny about family, and clear-eyed about the money and pressure that decide which deaths get investigated.

Harry Bosch works homicide with a chip on his shoulder and a demotion behind him, and the case pulls him into a bank job, an FBI agent who does not want him near it, and a war he has not finished having. Connelly was a crime reporter before this, and it shows in the procedural detail: warrants, jurisdiction fights, the boredom of surveillance. The Los Angeles here is a working city of freeways and shifts, not a movie set.

Cormoran Strike is a war veteran with a prosthetic leg, a collapsed relationship and a debt problem, and Robin Ellacott arrives as a temporary secretary on the morning everything changes for him. The case is old-fashioned detective work: interviews, contradictions in timelines, a rich family that lies out of habit. Robert Galbraith is the pen name J.K. Rowling published this series under, which is public knowledge now and was not when the book appeared.

Kurt Wallander is separated, eating badly, drinking more than he should, and worried about both his father and his daughter, and he is the reason half of modern Scandinavian crime fiction exists. The investigation is deliberately unglamorous, with false leads and weeks of nothing. What lifts it is what Mankell is actually writing about: a peaceful country discovering it is not as decent as it believed, and a police force being handed a social problem to solve with handcuffs.

Pradosh Mitter, called Feluda, was created by Satyajit Ray for a children's magazine in the 1960s and grew into something adults kept reading. Topshe narrates, Lalmohan Ganguly supplies the comedy, and the cases are built around real places: a hill station, a temple town, a Jaisalmer fort. The English collections translated by Gopa Majumdar put the stories in one place, and they move fast, with the clues laid out fairly enough that a sharp twelve-year-old can beat Feluda to it.

Saradindu Bandyopadhyay began these in Bengali in the 1930s, and Byomkesh is a genuinely unusual creation: married, domestic, unimpressed by his own cleverness, working out of a shared house in north Calcutta. The cases are short and often turn on something small in a household. This Penguin collection, translated by Sreejata Guha, gathers the well-known early ones and is the easiest way into him in English. The city he moves through is worth the ticket by itself.

Sita answers a panicked call from a friend, arrives at her flat, and finds a dead woman and a painting that will not stop mattering. Her aunt Lalli, long retired from the police and never quite retired from thinking, takes over. Swaminathan is a surgeon by profession and writes bodies and social hypocrisy with the same unsentimental eye. The Lalli books are short, sharp, and much less known than they deserve to be, which is the only reason this one sits at the bottom.