Finest of the Forties

Wow, if you’re looking to fill in any gaps in your reading of crime and mystery fiction from the 1940s, seek aid from Kate Jackson. In her Cross Examining Crime blog, she’s posted a four-part series highlighting her favorite whodunits published during that decade. Works by Manning Coles, Craig Rice, John Dickson Carr, Elizabeth Ferrars, Cornell Woolrich, Nancy Rutledge, Fredric Brown, and Christianna Brand have all made the cut. See her entries here, here, here, and here.

In a final installment yesterday, Jackson named her choices of the top-10 novels from that whole collection. Her number-one pick: Five Little Pigs (1942), by Agatha Christie, which she calls “a strong refutation of the still lingering idea that all traditional classic crime novels had cardboard thin characters.”