Sunday, October 19, 2014

Ten of the best detectives in books

Lucy Worsley is the author of The Art of the English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock.

She tagged a ten best list of fictional detectives for Publishers Weekly, including:
Ida Arnold (Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, 1938)

It’s hardly doing justice to Brighton Rock to describe it as genre fiction, but a killing and a murderer are the heart of this book about faith and God.

The good-hearted but blowsy heroine Ida Arnold, our detective figure, goes after a killer with a truly modern mind. Pinkie, the young anti-hero, lacks motive apart from a nihilistic passion for violence and death. With its seamy, seaside-resort setting, its lonely and hopeless characters and its bleak outlook on life, Brighton Rock has much in common with the hard-edged noir fiction soon to come.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Brighton Rock is among Alex Barclay's top ten psychological thrillers and Linda Grant's five best books with novel approaches to kindness.

--Marshal Zeringue