Modern Mystery Books to Read Based on Your Favorite Classic Sleuth

Japanese American writer Joe Ide’s brilliant young detective Isaiah Quintabe made his debut in 2016’s IQ and has appeared in five further mysteries. 

Blessed with a brilliant mind and an eagle eye for detail, high school dropout Quintabe was inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective, a boyhood hero of the author. IQ even has a Watsonian sidekick in the shape of the volatile Dodson , who details his casework on social media. 

Ide swaps the cobbled streets of foggy Victorian London for the sunnier yet equally crime-infested neighborhoods of modern South Central Los Angeles (an area Ide was born and raised in), but maintains the breath-taking feats of ‘ratiocination’ and tight plots that characterize the Holmes stories.

Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder series is still going strong close to five decades after the ex-NYPD detective turned unlicensed PI made his debut in The Sins of the Fathers (1976).

If you’re a fan of hardboiled city crime and you haven’t yet discovered the series, you are in for a treat. Scudder is a recovering alcoholic who lives in a down-at-heel Hell’s Kitchen hotel and investigates crime with a dogged determination that involves plenty of shoe-leather and late-night encounters in bars and alleyways.

A cast of relatable characters that build up through the course of the series and range from African-American street kids to Irish gangsters adds to the enjoyment.

A more recent addition to the tough, bruised but romantically inclined PI stable is David Baldacci’s Aloyius Archer. The series began with 2019’s One Good Deed.

Set in the fictional Poca City in the 1950s, the Archer books exude Noir glamour.

The English village-dwelling silver-haired sleuth created by Dame Agatha Christie would find a kindred spirit in Ruth Galloway, an unmarried forensic archaeologist (Dame Agatha, incidentally, was married to an archaeologist and often went with him on digs in the Middle East) who lives with her two cats in a cottage in rural Norfolk.

The series began with 2009’s The Crossing Place and currently runs to fifteen titles. 

Like the Miss Marple stories, the tone has elements of cosy crime, but with a darker edge, and Miss Galloway is a pleasing mix of empathy and misanthropy, with a wicked eye for human frailty and a deep-rooted knowledge of goings-on in her home area.

Dorothy L Sayers’ monocle-sporting upper-crust British sleuth is generally aided by his future wife, socialite Harriet Vane.

The roles are reversed in Ashley Weaver’s hugely entertaining Amory Ames series, which sees a fashionable female sleuth investigating crimes with the help of her playboy husband, Milo. 

The Amory Ames novels share the same stylish 1930s settings as Sayer’s Golden Age novels and, while they may lack the Queen of Crime’s eye for social satire, they make up for it with wit and panache.

Amory herself is a constant delight.

Malaysian author Shamini Flint’s wonderful Singapore policeman, Inspector Singh, may not be as well-dressed or as perfectly coiffed and manicured as Christie’s dapper Belgian sleuth, but he shares the same meticulousness when it comes to compiling and sifting evidence.

He also has a dimmer, more upright assistant in the shape of the by-the-book Sergeant Sukhor. 

Portly, dishevelled, and often slightly damp in the humidity of the Malaysian peninsula, the brilliant Sikh detective made his debut in A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder in 2009.

The Inspector Singh Investigates series currently runs to seven titles.

Ed McBain’s acclaimed series—which ran from 1956 to 2005—doesn’t focus on the efforts of just one detective, but on those of an entire NYPD department (much as Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue would on TV).

Regular characters come in and out, each playing his or her part in the investigation. A similar ensemble approach is taken by Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen in his Department Q novels. 

Focusing on the work of a Copenhagen police department that investigates cold cases, Department Q is home to a cast of oddballs who have been shoved aside by the mainstream cops for various misdemeanours (There’s a bit of a crossover with Mick Herron’s espionage Slough House series). 

Presided over by the brilliant but massively intolerant loner, Carl Mork, the team of engaging outsiders investigates mysteries everyone else thinks insoluble.

Adler-Olsen’s four-book series was recently turned into an excellent Netflix series.

Fans of the Martin Beck novels—inspired by McBain—will also enjoy Department Q.

Across on the other side of the Atlantic from George Simenon’s great creation, we find Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Armand Gamache.

The French-speaking Canadian detective enjoys his food as much as Maigret and has a similarly uncomplicated domestic life—both men are happily married to women they adore. 

Like the Frenchman, Gamache solves crimes through empathy and understanding rather than from factual analysis.

Admittedly, the backwoods community of Three Pines is not quite Paris, but like the great Belgian author’s books, Penny’s mysteries are filled with sympathy, warm friendships, and human kindness.