Sunday Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 132

Y2 JUNE 2 2013 THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 500 MUST- -READ BOOKS, PART TWO Mad, bad and dangerous From Victorian sleuths to LA private detectives, crime and punishment have always fascinated our finest writers CRIME The Woman in White Wilkie Collins (1859) "Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them," wrote Collins in the first great Victorian thriller. Strangers on a Train Patricia Highsmith (1950) The perfect murder is surely the one a sane person has no motive to commit. That's the premise of this tense and morally disturbing noir masterpiece in which two men become "what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off The Daughter of Time Josephine Tey (1951) Unusually topical with the rediscovery Josephine Tey's novel JOSEPHINE of Richard Ill's bones, TEY starts with a police inspector bored in hospital re-imagining the last Yorkist king, trying to work out whether he killed the princes in the Tower or not. The conclusion remains controversial, in some parts. The Complete Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle (1892-1927) HERLOS The drug-addicted, HOLMES violin-playing ex-prize fighter is the only mystery that never gets solved in these original, deliciously engineered and atmospheric detective stories set in "that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly st roger cells in this ingenious, rule-breaking country The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Agatha Christie (1926) Slippery red herrings meet smug little grey Greenland via what must be one of the most peculiar sex scenes in detective history.

In Cold Blood in tale Truman Capote (1966) Seven years after publishing Breakfast at Tiffany's, Capote published this sensational "non- fiction novel" about the senseless and brutal murder of a Kansas farmer, his wife and two of their children. Based on interviews with the appalled community and the killers, the book reinvented reportage. The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco (1980) BIO "Books always speak THE NOSE THE NAME OF of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told," writes the Italian philosopher in his postmodernist debut novel about murder in a 14th-century monastery. It is the scholarly reader's answer to The Da Vinci Code. The New York Trilogy PAUL Paul Auster (1985-86) AUSTERI Sly sleuthing in postmodernist this THE NEW YORK profound, literary quest TRILOGY which sends its author on a search for the meaning of self and the origins of language.

"Every life i is inexplicable," writes the author, "No matter how many facts are told." Misery Stephen King (1987) Inspired by King's resentment of readers who wanted him shackled to the horror genre, this bloodcurdling thriller sees novelist Paul Sheldon imprisoned and tortured by his "Number One The real fear though is that of every novelist: the though is that of every novelist: the blank, bloodless page. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler (1939) RAYMOND The cool master of CHANDLER hardboiled crime fiction sends PI Philip Marlowe into a murky web of murder, blackmail and pornography, while "under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of LA Confidential James Ellroy (1990) JAMES The sprawling and Ellrov the violent third self-proclaimed novel in L.A. "Mad Dog" of CONFIDENTIAL American crime fiction's thrilling, voyeuristic LA quartet sees three cops with varying degrees of attachment to justice and the law sucked down a drain of "astounding audacious Fatherland Robert Harris (1992) In this outstanding example of speculative fiction, Harris 2 won imagines the that Second Hitler World War and, by the 1960s, Britain is a client state ruled by King Edward VIII and Queen Wallis. Meanwhile, a detective in Berlin examines a corpse which stinks of conspiracy, but that is only the beginning of the truths waiting to be unearthed. of lesqgs True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey in tale (2000) The bushranger turned bank robber gets a voice "like a steel nibbed kookaburra on the fences in the morning sun" in Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel.

Never flinching from the extreme violence, Carey gives a rich emotional life to a national legend. Fingersmith Sultu Sarah Waters Waters (2002) Updating the decadent thrills of the ingesmith Victorian melodrama for the 21st century, Waters' daringly plotted, erotically charged and exquisitely detailed novel is as sly as its heroine. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Kate Summerscale (2009) (SPICIOSS In 1860, the body of three-year-old Saville Kent was thrust into the servants' lavatory of his father's country house. His throat had been slashed. In this insightful reconstruction, Summerscale turns the spotlight on the moral hypocrisy surrounding the case.

house murder mystery, Christie's masterpiece was inspired by her brother-in-law who suggested that the ideal fictional criminal would be a Dr Watson character. The Madman of Bergerac Georges Simenon (1932) Literature's most dogged detective, Commissaire Maigret, is en route to a restful rural weekend when the peculiar behaviour of a fellow train passenger arouses his curiosity and leads him to a quaint French country village terrorised by a homicidal maniac. The Nine Tailors Dorothy Sayers ME IS (1934) With a flawless English and dry humour that helps make her the most literary of the Golden Age mystery writers, Sayers' ninth novel featuring the crime-solving toff Lord Peter Wimsey is her most ingenious. Church bells chime spookily across remote Fen country. Rebecca Daphne du Maurier (1938) A childlike young woman with lank hair marries a mysterious and dominating older man and becomes dangerously obsessed with his charismatic but deceased first wife.

Psychologically acute, the novel was described by Germaine Greer as "a superior example of deeply encoded female PETER HOEG Smilla's FEELING SNOW novel follows investigation was pushed Copenhagen. Etmore: Get Shorty Leonard: Elmore Leonard (1990) GET SHORTY A loan attempts to make it big in Hollywood in this witty thriller loaded with Leonard's trademark whip-smart dialogue. Martin Amis once said his prose "makes Raymond Chandler look THE BEST OF THE REST Tales of Mystery and Imagination Edgar Allan Poe (1852) The Innocence of Father Brown Chesterton (1911) The Thin Man Dashiell Hammett (1934) True Grit Charles Portis (1968) The Hollow Man John Dickson Carr (1935) Nineteen Seventy-Four David Peace (1999) The Godfather Mario Puzo (1969) The Watchmen Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1987) A Dark- Adapted Eye Barbara Vine (1986) Devices and Desires James (1989) The Fifth Woman Henning Mankell (1996) Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow Peter Hoeg (1992) At the vanguard of what has since become a Scandinavian crime tsunami, Hoeg's unusual and gripping Miss Smilla's into whether a boy or fell from a roof in The clues take her to 118 My Name is Red Orhan Pamuk (1998) The Remorseful Day Colin Dexter (1999) The Girl Who Played with Fire Stieg Larsson (2006). The Journalist and the Murderer Janet Malcolm (1990).