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Classic Remarks: My Favourite Classic Mystery Writers

Hello to my first Classic Remarks post of 2021! This one is such a fun one and I could not pass it up, although writing it proved to be much harder than anticipated. While I like a lot of authors and the Golden Age of Mystery in general is a favourite, it’s always hard to define a “favourite author”.

My first, almost predictable choice, is Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime. Christie wrote cosy mysteries that sometimes aren’t as cosy as you might think. My favourites are her Poirot series, and I have a soft spot for the Mr Quinn stories. (Sorry Tommy and Tuppence but I read one of the books with you guys and got bored)

My second choice is G.K. Chesterton. I was first exposed to his works through his essays (I love Orthodoxy) but his Father Brown mysteries are so enjoyable! Father Brown is a priest who, like Miss Marple, uses his knowledge of human nature to solve the crimes that he stumbles upon. The writing is smooth with flashes of beauty, much like his essays, come to think about it.

Finally, another author I really enjoy is Dorothy L. Sayers because Peter Wimsey is just too entertaining. I haven’t read as many Wimsey books as I have Poirot, but I have enjoyed the ones that I’ve read and I definitely look forward to reading more!

Since I’m throwing recommendations around, I wanted to end my post with a recommendation for The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards. It’s not a mystery, but it is a fantastic book about how the genre developed and how mystery writers have always been trying to subvert and challenge the unspoken rules of the genre without departing from it entirely.

14 thoughts on “Classic Remarks: My Favourite Classic Mystery Writers

  1. We‘re currently reading our way through Agatha Christie‘s complete catalogue of novels in the Goodreads Christie Centenary group … would you like to join?

    The format is one Christie novel per month, in publication order, plus one “side read“ — a book by another Golden Age author, exemplifying one of the classic Golden Age topics and settings (country house / village, amateur detective, etc.). We started in October 2020, for the 100th publication anniversary of “The Mysterious Affair at Styles“, so we‘re still early in our journey … this month‘s read is “The Man in the Brown Suit“ (side read topic: “Murder by Transport“; book: the BLCC anthology “Blood on the Tracks“, edited by Martin Edwards).

    It‘s a public GR group, so anybody can join! (Note: We‘re currently debating a new group name, but you should find it using Christie‘s name as your group search term, as the group is tagged for that. The current name is still “The Agatha Christie Centenary“.)

    1. That sounds really fun! Do you know if the book overlaps with A Year with Christie 2021? (I think they changed to a quarterly format but I know it was monthly). I will have to check it out – my main worry with book clubs is that I don’t read the book in time!

      1. If the others are doing a quarterly thing, it‘s definitely a different group — the name is different, too. (Ours currently still has the word “centenary“ in it.)

        There‘s no pressure about “having“ to read the book(s) of the month the way we‘re doing it — if you don‘t feel like reading a particular book or can‘t fit it in, that‘s totally OK. I don‘t think we‘ve had a single month yet when *everybody* was actually reading the scheduled books, but there are always enough who do, so there‘s always plenty of lively discussion regardless how many people are participating. (We also have a number of people who are currently still catching up with the past couple of months‘ reads, and that‘s totally OK, too, of course.) If you decide to check out our little band, we‘d love to have you; I‘m sure I can say that for everybody.

  2. I always think I need to read the Father Brown books, and then I completely forget. Back on my TBR they go! XD

    I also only recently heard of Sayers for some reason, but I’d like to try some of her books, as well.

  3. I definitely would have chosen the Father Brown stories! I like that Chesterton tries to give readers all the clues so they can solve the mystery themselves, unlike the Sherlock Holmes books, where Sherlock often gets clues “offscreen” so he can then surprise the readers at the end.

    1. Yes! And they are based on human motivation so for me they’re slightly easier to figure out compared to Holmes (or maybe I’m just not used to the Holmes stories!)

    1. Please do! Dorothy Sayers wrote The Daughter of Time, which is super famous but I think to appreciate that you need to read the other Wimsey books (:

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