In the 1990s women detectives (and women authors) seemed to take over the whole subgenre of mysteries featuring private detectives, with a few notable exceptions like Robert Parker’s Spenser series, Bill Pronzini’s “Nameless Detective” books, and Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder novels. This trend is perhaps reversing with the addition of recent male private eyes like Charlie “Bird” Parker, the PI in John Connolly’s The Killing Kind and Stephen Greenleaf’s mysteries featuring John Marshall Tanner. But when I have a hankering for a good book with a private eye, I always reread two classic writers: Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Despite the fact that their external settings might seem a bit fusty and the pay scale is all wrong, the novels of these two authors have worn remarkably well.

• Recommend a favorite "private eye" story!

In the late 1930s, Chandler extolled the virtues of Dashiell Hammett (who, he felt, took murder out of the library and put it back on the streets where it belonged) and defined the hard-boiled detective genre in an essay for the Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Simple Art of Murder.” He might have been writing a justification of his own work as well: uncluttered prose, lots of metaphors, a wisecracking detective (Philip Marlowe), and the mean streets of a tough and uncaring city. Although my favorite remains The Big Sleep, a close second is Farewell, My Lovely.




Ross MacDonald’s novels are heavily Freudian in their exploration of how events in the past cast long and entangled tendrils into the present, and how the sins of the father (or mother) are forever visited on the child. Lew Archer, a spiritual descendant of Philip Marlowe’s, is at his best in The Galton Case; The Goodbye Look; and The Zebra-Striped Hearse.

The leader of the pack of women private eyes is Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton’s inspired invention, who has had a multiplicity of imitators. A Is for Alibi, which introduces Kinsey, is a good place to start, of course, but try F Is for Fugitive or Q Is for Quarry, other equally good puzzles.

Other private detectives include the team of Lydia Chin and Bill Smith in the wonderful series by S. J. Rozan, which began with China Trade, and Precious Ramotswe, a wonderful invention of Alexander McCall Smith’s, in the series beginning with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, about Botswana’s only female detective.

Here are some more private-eye novels:

Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Dana Stabenow’s A Fine and Bitter Snow

Robert Crais’s The Monkey’s Raincoat

Stuart Kaminsky’s To Catch a Spy

Karen Kijewski’s Kat’s Cradle

Marcia Muller’s Edwin of the Iron Shoes

Rex Burns’s Ground Money

Sara Paretsky’s Burn Marks

Linda Barnes’s Cold Case

Dennis Lehane’s Prayers for Rain

James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss

Larry Beinhart’s You Get What You Pay For

Sandra Scoppettone’s My Sweet Untraceable You

Earl Emerson’s The Portland Laugher

G. M. Ford’s Who in Hell is Wanda Fuca?

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