I looked at my ten favourite fictional sleuths a little while ago, and so, in honour of today’s Bodies from the Library conference at the British Library, here are my ten favourite novels that the excellent British Library Crime Classics range introduced me to.
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If you’ve never read a classic-era novel of crime and detection, what are you waiting for? There’s that Agatha Christine lady who wrote those David Suchet books, and the British Library has been putting out affordable classics for a little while now — go ahead and dig in. Sure, some of them are better than others, but if you want a good introduction to this type of thing then Alan Melville’s circus-set Death of Anton might just be the perfect place to start: it’s very witty, written with the lightest of touches, and wastes no time in maundering on in a wannabe hard-boiled fashion while dealing with the seeming imprecations of a circus where death keeps raising its head…
The Invisible Event 