Vincent McCaffrey's Blog - Posts Tagged "mysteries"

I judge authors by what they intended to accomplish as well as on whether they managed to accomplished it. I judge authors by how much I enjoyed reading them. Originality and style are important, but not the key to greatness lest we leave Shakespeare aside. My favorite mystery authors have surpassed at each of these things to various degrees. Yet Chandler disliked Sayers and Christie, though he backtracked on that later on. Doyle cannot be denied. But my list of the five best mysteries would be idiosyncratic not for the differences between Chandler and Christie, or the fact that not one is at all like the other, or the fact that the Doyle I have read most repeatedly in my life is not a novel but a collection of stories that reveals a single unique character at its center, but for going afield, so to speak, with Buchan. My favorite mysteries would be, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, and Greenmantle by John Buchan.