The Top 50 Mysteries . . . and No Apologies

You’ve got to have a body or two, a detective of sorts and a sense of place as unmistakable as a knife in the back.

Like happy families, mystery novels are all alike, yet we devour them by the hundreds of thousands every year. We read them for intellectual sport and diversion. We read them because they offer adventurous escape.

Mysteries offer the illusion of an ordered world. They follow rules as stern as any parochial-school handbook, yet the best mystery writers keep to the rules without seeming to. In the end we read them because they give pleasure; because they make us laugh, make us cry, make us wait.

What are the greatest mysteries ever written? Buffs will argue the question until rigor mortis sets in and the corpse in the next room decomposes, but this list is presented with no apologies. Each fulfills the quintessential requirement of fiction: It is a good read. It begins well and ends better.

Here then are the 50 best mysteries, in chronological order.

* “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Edgar Allan Poe (1841). No clues--only a room in “wildest disorder,” a blood-besmeared razor, a body shoved up a chimney and all the doors and windows locked. This is the Adam of mysteries, the seed that fathered all the rest.

* “The Moonstone,” Wilkie Collins (1868). A diamond as big as the Ritz, a crotchety butler, multiple narratives. Even T.S. Eliot, who harbored reservations about “Hamlet,” called this “the first and greatest of English detective novels.”

* “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” Arthur Conan Doyle (1892). “Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Red-Headed League,” “The Five Orange Pips,” “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”--these tales are among the best by Doyle or anybody else.

* “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Arthur Conan Doyle (1902). Supernatural terror--the fog-bound moors, a hellish hound--gets demystified by the unmuddled rationalism of fiction’s greatest detective.

* “Trent’s Last Case,” E.C. Bentley (1913). The victim is Sigsbee Manderson, a Wall Street Colossus whose death panics the market and piques the curiosity of Philip Trent, ace reporter.

* “The Thirty-Nine Steps,” John Buchan (1915). Richard Hannay, a British Everyman bored by England and ready to return to South Africa, discovers a corpse and a cryptic notebook in his sitting room.

* “Inspector French’s Greatest Case,” Freedman Wills Croft (1924). A locked-room murder with assumed identities, a secret code, trains and timetables, and all sorts of underhanded tomfooleries deciphered by the suave inspector.

* “The Benson Murder Case,” S.S. Van Dine (1926). The flippant and cynical Philo Vance, working from nothing more than two cigarette butts, solves the murder of a Wall Street broker.

* “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” Agatha Christie (1926). The most controversial mystery Christie or anyone else has ever contrived.

* “The Maltese Falcon,” Dashiell Hammett (1930). A watershed mystery, first of the hard-boiled genre: hard, ironic, stinted. Sam Spade can talk tough, fall for a phony “broad” and punch out a punk all in the time it takes to roll a Bull Durham.

* “The Murder at the Vicarage,” Agatha Christie (1930). Miss Marple makes her brilliant debut in a “teapot” of an English village.

* “Mystery Mile,” Margery Allingham (1930). A droll mystery filled with a seeming hodgepodge of clues: a red chess piece, a suitcase of children’s books, an unexpected suicide, a garden maze.

* “Maigret Stonewalled,” Georges Simenone (1931). Intuitive and cerebral, a Napoleon of detectives, Maigret solves two mysteries: the identity of the victim and of the murderer.

* “Malice Aforethought,” Francis Iles (1931). “It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr. Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter.” We know who done it; the trick is to catch him.

* “The Chinese Orange Mystery,” Ellery Queen (1934). Queen finds a locked room with the corpse and furnishings bizarrely turned backward.

* “The Nine Tailors,” Dorothy Sayers (1934). Foppish Lord Peter Wimsey solves an anonymous murder in the English fen country.

* “The Thin Man,” Dashiell Hammett (1934). Nick and Nora Charles are not the Hollywood cream puffs played by William Powell and Myrna Loy, but the best and hardest-drinking husband and wife duo in crime.

* “The Amazing Adventures of Father Brown,” Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1935). Father Brown is a Thomistic sleuth who trusts reason just as far as it can reach. Evil, ultimately, lies beyond reason’s ken.

* “Gaudy Night,” Dorothy Sayers (1936). Harriet Vane returns to Shrewsberry College--Sayers’ Oxford--only to encounter unpleasantness about professional women and the ethics of scholarship.

* “Hamlet, Revenge!” Michael Innes (1937). Another Oxford tale in which J.I.M. Stewart gracefully mixes scholarship and sleuthing. John Appleby, of Scotland Yard, is erudite and affected without being priggish.

* “Artists in Crime,” Ngaio Marsh (1938). Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn’s chaste yet tumultuous passions tend to interfere with his sleuthing, which is against all the canons of detective novels.

* “Brighton Rock,” Graham Greene, (1938). “Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours.” A thriller that explores the criminal psychology of Punk, a baby-faced grotesque.

* “Too Many Cooks,” Rex Stout (1938). Nero Wolfe lectures on American cooking, is shot, finds a murderer and, as always, eats heartily and discourses mightily.

* “The Crooked Hinge,” John Dickson Carr (1938). In this tale of mistaken identities and survivors of the Titanic, Old Gideon Fell offers a “perfectly logical and reasonable explanation of the impossible”--a crime that would baffle a Mensa member, as Carr’s books do.

* “The Big Sleep,” Raymond Chandler (1939). If Hammett is the Hemingway of detective fiction, Chandler is the Fitzgerald or Faulkner: tough, cynical and lyrical. Philip Marlowe makes his debut in this tale of Los Angeles’ spoiled rich.

* “Ten Little Indians,” Agatha Christie (1939). Like so many of Christy’s books, this one is given focus by a nursery rhyme and a confined space, Indian Island, to which dinner guests have been invited. One by one they are murdered--and then there are none.

* “The Ministry of Fear,” Graham Greene (1943). Arthur Rowen blunders into the “ministry of fear” on the eve of World War II and finds a nest of Nazis plotting to destroy the free world.

* “Intruder in the Dust,” William Faulkner (1948). Lynch mobs, white trash, exhumations and racists--they all people Faulkner’s potboiler in Yoknapatawpha County.

* “Head of a Traveler,” Nicholas Blake (1949). This thriller features a dwarf, a brilliant poet and, not surprising, a plethora of literary allusions.

* “The 31st of February,” Julian Symons (1950). A portrait of a man driven to madness--by guilt? By a sadistic policeman? Symons never tells and his solution is open-ended and many-angled, like madness itself.

* “The Daughter of Time,” Josephine Tey (1951). Richard III, England’s most spectacular villain, is exonerated by Alan Grant, convalescing in a hospital. The face mirrors the soul and Richard’s is not bent and calculating, but kindly, shrewd and solemn.

* “The Danger Within,” Michael Gilbert (1952). Murder among Allied troops in an Italian POW camp during World War II is investigated by Captain Goyles. Was the victim a Nazi spy? A double agent? Was the murderer an informer?

* “The Long Goodbye,” Raymond Chandler (1953). In as Dickensian a plot as Chandler ever wrought, Marlowe is jailed, beaten and abused. The setting is Idle Valley, Calif.; the supporting cast, rich and callous.

* “Memento Mori,” Muriel Spark (1959). “Remember you must die” is the telephone message delivered to a host of octogenarians. This is a metaphysical mystery that surpasses the conventions and tracks down the Ultimate Killer.

* “Love in Amsterdam,” Nicolas Freeling (1962). The ironic and truculent Van der Valk finds the murderer of a former lover, dangling Mrs. Van der Valk as the bait.

* “Poets and Murder,” Robert Hans Gulik (1968). During the T’ang Dynasty the Confucian scholar Judge Dee and his husky cohorts outthink and out-muscle Chinese bandits of all sorts.

* “Poetic Justice,” Amanda Cross (1970). A winsome professional woman sleuth Kate Fansler investigates the death of a colleague in a very Columbia-like university.

* “Points and Lines,” Seicho Matsumoto (1970). Kirchi Mihara suspects murder in the apparent love suicide of a couple found dead on the beach.

* “The Detective Wore Silk Drawers,” Peter Lovesey (1971). Gruff and endearing Edwardian Sergeant Cribb matches wits and fists with criminals and pugs promoting the illegal sport of bare-fisted pugilism.

* “The Underground Man,” Ross Macdonald (1971). The older generation has been poisoned by “a kind of moral DDT” and the young are drugged out. Seeking to recover a kidnaped child, Lew Archer digs deeply and exhumes old loves and old murders.

* “Death of an Expert Witness,” P.D. James (1977). Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh is a poet detective, but his poetry, like Sherlock Holmes’ violin, is unobtrusive. A forensic scientist, James knows the ins and outs of corpses.

* “Long Time No See,” Ed McBain (1977). No puzzles, no poison, no tea cozies. Detective Steve Carella of the 87th Precinct pounds the city pavement, checking and rechecking as he hunts down the brutal murderer of a blind man and his wife.

* “A Morbid Taste for Bones,” Ellis Peters (1977). The connivings of God and man are the stuff investigated by Brother Cadfael in this remarkable recreation of 12th-Century England.

* “The Empty Copper Sea,” John D. MacDonald (1978). Where and why did Hub Lawless disappear, abandoning a family and successful career? Travis McGee leaves The Busted Flush in dry dock to ask hard questions and mix it up with Florida toughs.

* “The Maine Massacre,” Janwillem van de Wetering (1979). The author is a former Amsterdam policeman and Zen monk. His policeman is a wily old Dutch officer. And the New England countryside gets peppered with a host of Yankee originals in this murder tale.

* “Trial Run,” Dick Francis (1979). Randall Drew--a bespectacled, asthmatic former jockey--investigates whether the site of the 1980 Olympics is safe for Lord Harrington to ride.

* “Gorky Park,” Martin Cruz Smith (1981). In pre- perestroika Russia three bodies are found in Gorky Park, their faces skinned off. It’s one of the best whodunits of the ‘80s.

* “The Name of the Rose,” Umberto Eco (1983). Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Francis Bacon and Sherlock Holmes all come together in the person of Franciscan Brother William of Baskerville, who arrives in a wealthy Italian abbey to investigate heresy.

* “Glitz,” Elmore Leonard (1985). Miami and Puerto Rico, gambling casinos and a psychotic killer. Leonard’s stylistic swagger is unmistakable.

* “A Thief of Time,” Tony Hillerman (1988). The detectives, Lt. Joe Leaphorn and officer Jim Chee, are Navajo Indians. Mysticism and Anglo greed vie for archeological treasure, while Leaphorn struggles to reconcile his cultural heritage with the world of materialism.