Les Aventures de Sherlock Holmes

A respectable London doctor and the brutal stranger who keeps turning up in his affairs. Short enough to finish in an evening, and told as an investigation rather than a confession.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The first detective story ever written, with Dupin solving a locked room murder in Paris by pure reasoning. Forty pages, and every detective since owes it something.

Edgar Allan Poe

Dickens died halfway through this one, so the mystery of what happened to Edwin Drood has no official answer. Readers have been arguing about it ever since.

Charles Dickens

A family curse, a moor at night and a hound that should not exist. The best known Holmes novel, and the one where Watson does most of the legwork alone.

Arthur Conan Doyle

A woman in white stops a man on a road outside London at midnight, and the conspiracy behind her takes eight hundred pages to unravel. Told through several narrators, one of whom steals the book.

Wilkie Collins