Crime novels transcend whodunits: Crime and Punishment (1866) by Dostoevsky grapples with morality, while The Maltese Falcon (1930) weaves philosophy through plot. Tiger in the Smoke (1952) blends religion with murder, and A Judgment in Stone (1977) reveals a killer early but excels in psychological depth. From Chandler’s Marlowe to Spillane’s Hammer, these works critique societal corruption and justice. Yet beyond fiction, the episode pivots to abortion data—1,038,100 procedures last year post-Roe v. Wade—and Pre-Born’s fetal heartbeat-driven outreach, saving 67,000 pregnancies annually, proving literature and activism both demand reckoning with human consequences. [Automatically generated summary]
I don't know if the crime novel, sometimes called the mystery novel, the British call it the crime novel.
I always like that expression better because not every great crime story has an actual mystery like a hoodunnen in it.
But one of the reasons I like the crime novel so much is because it combines tight plotting and action with genuine, oftentimes deep explorations of life and philosophy and spirituality that are just built in to the story.
You don't have to talk about them.
They're just there.
So I just wanted to talk about, you know, probably they'll call this the 10 best crime novels, but that's not what this is.
These are 10 great crime novels, many of which have changed my life and some of which may change your life, and they're really good reads as well.
Of course, first you have to mention before any of them, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Depending on the translation, Dostoevsky can be tough to read, but he is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant genius of a novelist.
This is a story of a young man named Raskolnikov.
It was written in 1866, and it's a story of a young man who decides that his superior intellect gives him the right to commit a crime.
And he goes and he kills two women, one of whom is a pawnbroker to whom he owes money.
And it is what happens to him after he does that.
It's just a brilliant, brilliant exploration of morality and the moral web and of conscience and of Christianity.
But it also has scenes in it that are kind of inventions that you've never seen before, like the questioning of Raskolnikov by the police is in every TV show that you've ever seen.
I mean, the closer is just crime and punishment redone again and again and again.
One of the most profound novels.
I read it first when I was 19 years old, and it worked as an antidote to the moral relativism that was becoming popular in the universities, because once you see the murder scene in this, you realize that, no, some things are just wrong, and would we be wrong, even if we took a vote and 100% of people said they were right, they would still be wrong.
And so it actually saved my soul in many ways.
Just a great book.
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, 1860, a Victorian Gothic novel, but it's a Gothic novel that takes place not in an Italian castle, but in an English country home.
It was published in Charles Dickens magazine, Household Words, I believe, and Dickens is said to have edited it very heavily, which may be why it is better than anything else Wilkie Collins ever did.
But Wilkie Collins was a good writer, but this is a great book, and it is one of the great plots of all time.
The characters are just unbelievable, and it is just about a man who is going off to work as a tutor to two young women, and he bumps into a woman in white who says some mysterious stuff to him, and it just sort of turns his whole life around.
I don't want to give too much of it away because every page is a page turner.
I don't know why this book is not talked about more often, and it's been made into BBC episodes.
It was made into an American movie once, which is not very good, a black and white American movie.
I saw the BBC version.
It was not very good.
I've never seen a good film version.
That doesn't mean there aren't any, but it should be made again.
It's just so, so good.
And it taught me a lot about writing mysteries.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.
Raymond Chandler, one of the great American writers, 1939.
This is the first installment in the Philip Marlowe novels.
He is a private eye in LA, and he goes to the home of a wealthy man named General Sternwood, who basically wants him to solve a blackmailing case on his daughter.
Made into a great movie with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, but the book is so beautifully written.
All of the Marlowe novels, well, not all of them, but there's five, six, or seven of them.
I can't remember the exact number, but at least five of them are just really, really wonderful.
The Big Sleep is the first one.
It changes the landscape of American crime writing.
The writing is so fantastic, and the character also changed my life because he was an example of a man in a corrupt world acting well.
We get the phrase, down these mean streets, from Raymond Chandler, who wrote the sentence, down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
And that, to me, was the absolute definition of manhood when I was a young man and actually remains so today.
Another great hard-boiled American novel, The Maltese Falcon by Dash Lahamed, 1930, also made into a great Humphrey Mogart movie.
This is Sam Spade, who finds himself caught up in a search for a priceless falcon statue and falling in love with a woman who is part of this search.
It is an unbelievably good book.
The plot is unbelievably great.
And talk about a novel that expresses philosophy and ideas and notions about the world purely through plot.
I think The Maltese Falcon is just a great example of this.
Eye the Jury by Mickey Spillane.
Eye the Jury, Mickey Spillane once had, since 1947, he is a late-stage tough guy writer.
His character, Mike Hammer, as you can tell by his name, is just so tough that when he questions you, if you don't give him the right answer, he'll just beat the crap out of you.
I mean, he's the toughest detective ever.
At one point, Spillane had seven novels, I believe, on the New York Times bestseller list at one time, and he was despised for his conservatism.
I mean, if you can hear Eye the Jury, he has another book called Vengeance is Mine.
And in other words, it's Mickey Spillane, it's Mike Hammer taking justice into his own hands because the society has become too liberal, basically, to actually deal with crime.
Eye the Jury ends with one of the sexiest scenes in popular fiction.
It is really, it used to be a joke that little boys hid the book under their bed so they could read it after their parents went to sleep, but it still remains a great scene.
Why We Prefer Ruth Rundell00:07:11
At one point, there was a famous author named Thomas Wolfe, not the Tom Wolf we know, who was very verbose and the intellectuals loved him.
And one day, Ayn Rand took a description from Thomas Wolfe of a rainy day in New York and a description from Mickey Spilane of a rainy day in New York and showed how much better a writer Mickey Spillane was than the most fashionable writer of his day.
It was one of the cruelest things Ayn Rand ever did and absolutely hilarious.
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Tiger in the Smoke, somewhat forgotten novel by Marjorie Allingham, 1952, but it brings you into Britain after the war.
It is, I think, I don't want to say it's the first, but I think it's the first like serial killer novel.
It's the first novel of a guy who is just absolutely evil.
He is looking for a treasure.
I don't want to give too much of it away, but it is a deeply, profoundly religious book, and its final revelation is just absolutely mind-blowing.
Really wonderful book.
Marjorie Allingham was one of what they call the queens of mystery in Britain.
It's the best one of her books I've read.
There are a lot of them.
Her detective is Albert Campion, who really plays a kind of minor role in this, but he's part of her series.
Another one of the, probably the greatest of the queens of mystery was Agatha Christie.
In 1926, she wrote The Murder of Roger Aykroyd, which I can't remember if that's her first novel or not.
It may be, but it is really something.
It takes place in a small village, and it is just an observation of village life that turns around a murder that may be a death that may be a murder and maybe a suicide.
It has one of the most shocking revelations in all of literature in it.
It's spectacularly done.
Agatha Christie, I won't call her a great writer in the sense of being a great prose stylist, but if you read a number of her books, and they're easy to read, you can read them almost in a day, but if you read a number of her books, you get a wonderful depiction of Britain between the wars, during the war, and after the war.
And I think the murder of Roger Aykroyd is just a wonderful depiction of British life.
Brat Farrar is by Josephine Tay, another one of the Queens of Mystery.
This is 1949.
Now, most of the time when people talk about Josephine Tay, they talk about The Daughter of Time, which is a very clever mystery in which her detective, I think, is laid up with a broken leg and decides to entertain himself by solving the mystery of who killed the princes in the tower in medieval times.
And that's, so everybody thinks that's very clever.
It is.
It's a very clever book, but Brad Farrar is better.
And it is a wonderful, wonderful story about a man who commits suicide and then somebody comes back and claims to be him.
And is it him or is it not him?
It may well be.
It's really a terrific, terrific novel.
And what I love about Josephine Tay, she herself was a very weird person, possibly gay, but just kind of odd.
But what I love about her books is they are just full, flush with British decency.
And just the decency of the good people in it makes you want to cry because it's so out of date and so wonderful.
The Postman Always Rings Twice, one of the greatest American novels, a great American tough guy novel by James M. Kaine, 1934.
This is about a drifter and a married woman who fall in love and plot to murder her husband, which is kind of the classic James M. Kaine story.
He also wrote Double Indemnity, which is one of the greatest movies, tough guy movies ever made, written by, in part, by Raymond Chandler, but the book is not as good.
The Postman Always Rings Twice is one of the greatest, sexiest, coolest books ever.
You can read it in a couple of hours, and I just recommend it so highly.
You will love it.
Just steam is so sexy.
It steam comes off the page, and they've never been able to match it.
The first version of the movie with John Garfield is quite good, but not as good as the book.
Judgment in Stone, A Judgment in Stone by Ruth Rundell, who is also Barbara Vine.
She is one of the greatest modern.
I chose these books.
There are good modern writers, like me, who write crime stories, but I chose these books because only after a certain number of years do you know whether a book is really great or not.
And so I chose these.
These are a little older, but Ruth Rundell wrote this in 1977.
She wrote compulsively, so she would bring out two, three, four books a year.
And so she was never as big a bestseller, at least in America, as she should have been because she's a wonderful, wonderful writer.
Her books as Barbara Vine, including Dark Adapted Eye, are among the classics of British mystery.
But I like A Judgment in Stone because it starts out by telling you who is going to get killed.
And it makes it so suspenseful because you get to know these people very well, a number of people who are going to get killed.
You get to know them very well.
You start hoping against hope that they're not going to be killed.
And it's just an amazing, amazing, tragic story.
It's the crime novel as tragedy.
And it's so good.
And it's dark.
I have to say, it is not a pleasant book to read.
It is a very dark book, but just such a wonderful depiction of both the minds of ordinary people and the mind of a murderer.
Ruth Rundell, I can't recommend her highly enough.
So those are 10 great crime novels.
And again, they're not, you know, people always write to me and say, well, you didn't include this and you didn't include that.
These are novels that I picked.
These are not novels that were shown to me, but I picked these novels.
And you can say, I didn't include this or that.
I only had 10.
I was only going to put in 10.
These are just 10 great ones that I think will really rock your boat.