Right, you probably know the drill by now: 100+ sleuths nominated, top 64 chosen, the top half of 32 already voted on…today you’re voting on the bottom half of the first round.
As before, this half is shown in order — the winner of Vote 17 will play the winner of Vote 18 in round 2, etc. — and seedings are shown in brackets after each name. Pick your favourite from each pair, job done. Polls are open until 12:01 am BST on Saturday 1st October.

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I find it hilarious that the poll opened the top half with John Dickson Carr’s Gideon Fell vs. David Hadley and closes the bottom half with Carter Dickson’s H.M. vs. Humphrey Masters — I promise I did nothing to engineer that.
Obviously anyone not in any of the votes didn’t make the top 64, and I’m not sure what else to say about that. Seedings 61 onwards all received a single nomination and so were sorted purely on account of who had appeared in the most books during the given era as outline before. I’ll admit that some of the names were pretty obscure and I had a difficult time establishing exactly how many books some characters had been in, but I did the due diligence and am, like, 99% sure of my findings.
Hope you enjoyed that, because there are five more rounds of voting to go. I’ve worked out a schedule for this now, and the second round will be here for your choosing pleasure on Saturday 15th October.
Well done for doing this – though it sounds truly exhausting!
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Being prepared helped — I wrote out a list of about 80 names I thought likely to come up (and only one didn’t…!), which helped keep track, and then the 20-odd names who were nominated and I’d failed to anticipate were easy to add in. Otherwise, yes, I might have taken on a little more than I was capable of achieving easily 😄
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Done my voting. Some difficult choices there – when 2 come up that I have little opinion on, followed by a pair where I would like to vote for both. (Lam v Bradley – what a cut-throatvdevision!) Anyway, good stuff.
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Who or what is Lam?
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Donald Lam, as in the Bertha Cool books by Erle Stanley Gardner. A niche person, but much appreciated by some. Though I think safe to say you would’ve voted for Bradley whoever the opposition was? 😀It should say ‘cut-throat decision’ but you probably worked that out!
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Aha! I haven’t read Gardner. (Mason to me means “the creator of Hanaud”.)
Mrs. Bradley is my favourite sleuth – but I’m glad she wasn’t up against Poirot or Dr. Fell. I’d have voted for Mrs. Croc – but with regrets!
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I believe Moira is referring to Donald Lam v Mrs Bradley in vote 31.
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Indeed, and it’s only going to get tougher…
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Father Brown v. Doug Selby was the real kicker for me this time!
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Ooh, lots of tough decisions here, especially with some more obscure (for me anyways) names that are popping up. Excited to see what happens next!
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In many cases, I’m happy that recognition will preserve my of my favorites on the list, in others I’m upset that obscurity will surely doom other favorites. But it’s the same way for me— in some cases I voted for a name by default, purely because it was the one name of the two which whom I was familiar.
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Aha Maigret is here finally!
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Indeed he is — spread the word, ensure he sticks around 🙂
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I suppose you must have had a lot of characters with the same number of votes even within the top 64? Were they also separated by the number of books they appeared in? And what if they were still tied?
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The answers you seek are here:
https://theinvisibleevent.com/2022/08/27/53576/
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