{"id":10161,"date":"2023-01-04T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-04T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10161"},"modified":"2023-01-30T08:06:25","modified_gmt":"2023-01-30T13:06:25","slug":"favorite-literary-detectives-whos-yours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10161","title":{"rendered":"Favorite Literary Detectives–Who’s Yours?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last month The Guardian<\/a><\/em> asked a number of today\u2019s best crime writers to ID their favorite literary detectives. This is what they said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Banville<\/strong> became a crime novel devotee when he met Raymond Chandler\u2019s Philip Marlowe in the pages of The Big Sleep<\/em>. He admits Marlowe is \u201chis creator\u2019s dream version of himself: tough, but tender too, wised up but not cynical, a private eye who has read a book.\u201d Lee Child\u2019s Jack Reacher, favorite of author Dreda Say Mitchell,<\/strong> seems to me to similarly represent authorial wish-fulfillment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lawrence Block\u2019s Matt Scudder\u2014ex New York cop cum private eye\u2014was the choice of Ian Rankin<\/strong>. He says Scudder is a detective with all of the conventional baggage, yet achieving \u201cthe perfect hardboiled mix of grit and poetry: cool jazz with surface noise.\u201d Rankin\u2019s own protagonist John Rebus would get this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Billingham<\/strong> credits Dashiell Hammett\u2019s Sam Spade with launching the American hardboiled private eye genre in The Maltese Falcon<\/em>. Yet, the book\u2019s \u201cmost enduring mystery\u201d is Spade himself, a character with much more going on than what is revealed on the page. Perhaps this contributes to the perennial appeal of Sherlock Holmes, too (what is<\/em> going on in that head of his?), the choice of author Saima Mir<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Australian author Chris Hammer\u2019s detective Nell Buchanan is the pick of Ann Cleeves<\/strong>, while Val McDermid<\/strong>\u2019s favorite is Scottish writer Josephine Tey\u2019s chameleonlike Inspector Alan Grant, who appeared in six novels from 1929 to 1952. He\u2019s featured in Tey\u2019s 1951 novel, The Daughter of Time,<\/em> selected by the British Crime Writers\u2019 Association in 1990 as the greatest crime novel of all time. OK, I\u2019m ordering it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, and even Jessica Fletcher were cited by several of the authors and are beloved by readers of all ages. I most resonated with Stella Duffy<\/strong>\u2019s choice, Trixie Belden, a pre-teen favorite at my house. \u201calmost always fierce and brave, confronting what she saw as injustice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Baldacci<\/strong> picked Ross Macdonald\u2019s Lew Archer, popular heir to the Los Angeles mean streets of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. He says \u201cArcher brought to the table a heart and a soul, and a way of making sense of the world that was deeply, viscerally connected to the reader.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In general, these were safe choices. Mostly they represented series\u2014that is, a body of work. Ten years from now, who\u2019d be your nominees? I\u2019d hope to see Joe Ide\u2019s Isaiah Quintabe, Nick Petrie\u2019s Peter Ash, and Mick Herron\u2019s Slough House team in the mix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month The Guardian asked a number of today\u2019s best crime writers to ID their favorite literary detectives. This is what they said: John Banville became a crime novel devotee when he met Raymond Chandler\u2019s Philip Marlowe in the pages … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Popular crime writers name their own favorite detectives. Who's yours?","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[122,61,54,40,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book","category-character","category-detective","category-fiction","category-the-morgue"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2DT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10161"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10164,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10161\/revisions\/10164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}