In response to a survey in 1995, members of the Mystery Writers of America put The Complete Sherlock Holmes on the top of the list of the 100 Best Mysteries of All Time, with The Hound of the Baskervilles, A Study in Scarlet, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Sign of Four receiving a lot of votes as individual books.
Certainly this comes as no surprise. Who wouldn’t rank Sherlock Holmes number one among mystery books? The significance for me is that modern day practitioners of the craft – writers turning out everything from traditional whodunits to hard-boiled private eye novels to private eye novels and even police procedurals – acknowledged the preeminent role of Sherlock Holmes in the world of mystery fiction.
Rounding out the top five on the 100 Best list were The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allen Poe, The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey and Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow.
Outside of Sherlock Holmes, what are your favorite mysteries?
Why, the Three Investigators, of course!
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