Calling enthusiasts of crime fiction!

Why are women the best mystery writers?

Also the main character, the detective, is crucial. The more well-formed and interesting this character is, the better the book. Most mystery writers stick with the same detective through all their books. You get to know these people. Their thought-processes. Their idiosycracies. IMO, it's the detectives that make the books worth reading.

I love Ngaio Marsh because her detective is fascinating.

“Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” –Ross Macdonald[19]

“Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.” –Paul Auster[19]

“The prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action-tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision … The reader is captivated by Chandler’s seductive prose.” –Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books.[19]

“Chandler is one of my favorite writers. His books bear rereading every few years. The novels are a perfect snapshot of an American past, and yet the ruined romanticism of the voice is as fresh as if they were written yesterday.” –Jonathan Lethem[19]

“Chandler seems to have invented our post-war dream lives–the tough but tender hero, the dangerous blonde, the rain-washed sidewalks, and the roar of the traffic (and the ocean) in the distance … Chandler is the classic lonely romantic outsider for our times, and American literature, as well as English, would be the poorer for his absence.” –Pico Iyer[19]

The difference between Chandlereque crime and the Whodunits of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, is that because of 1st person narrative you're inside Marlowe's head all the time. You find things out at the same time he does, there's no scene at the end where the detective exposes the murderer.

Never got into this genre of fiction. I do like the non-fiction works that surround things like art theft or the development of forensic sciences. Like, for instance"the Poisoners Handbook" which was a good review of the development of forensics in the US from late 1800 through DNA methodology.

I tried reading a Janet Ivanovitch and was really turned off within 10 pages.