Everyone’s a Critic

It’s a thankless task to create an “essentials” list for crime, mystery, and/or thriller fiction. Inevitably, people are going to question your choices, your experience with the genre, and perhaps even your very intelligence. Nonetheless, used-books retailer AbeBooks is just out with its selection of “Thirty Essential Mystery Authors.”

Many of the usual suspects are included, from Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler to John le Carré, Mickey Spillane, Elmore Leonard, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, and Patricia Highsmith. But as other readers have pointed out in the still-growing comments section at the bottom of that post, the AbeBooks folks somehow managed to leave out important wordsmiths on the order of Ross Macdonald, Georges Simenon, Ellery Queen, Anne Perry, Alistair MacLean, Ian Rankin, Jim Thompson, Minette Walters, David Goodis, Walter Mosley, and … well, you get the idea. Whoever compiled this rundown must now be thinking it wasn’t worth the grief.