7 One-Sitting Mystery Reads to Devour at the Beach

Elizabeth Daly was the Grande Dame of US mystery writing in the 40s and 50s, and, like all Golden Age detective fiction writers, her novels generally turn in at around 150 pages.

Daly’s regular amateur sleuth, Henry Gamadge, is a rare book and hand-writing expert. He makes his debut in this 1940 mystery that sees our urbane crime-hound vacationing on the coast of Maine.

There’s little chance for Gamadge to recline on a sun lounger, however, as local police quickly come knocking on his door asking for help with a murder case. Could it be linked to a bitter battle over an inheritance and a mysterious late night rendezvous?

Elizabeth Daly was Agatha Christie’s favorite American mystery writer, and it’s easy to see why.

Modern British Queen of Crime Cleeves is the creator of two of the greatest 21st century fictional detectives: Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez. It’s the latter who features in this barnstorming novella from 2016.

Perez is dragged away from his usual patch on the remote island of Shetland to look into a mysterious death of a woman in a sleepy town in the Scottish borders.

The case is complicated by the fact that the chief suspect is the new husband of Perez’ ex-wife. Gossip says he was having an affair with the victim.

The detective must put aside personal feelings in a quest for the truth.

Swiss writer Durrenmatt was best known as an award-winning playwright, but he also penned four exceptional crime novels.

In this one, the discovery of a murdered child in the forest leads the brilliant young Inspector Matthai to make a promise to the mother—he will find the killer no matter what it takes.

The arrest and confession of a local man should see that promise fulfilled, but Matthai is not convinced, and continues his quest for the truth.

The Pledge was memorably filmed in 2001, with Jack Nicholson as the obsessed detective.

Scots author Spark is best known for literary classics, such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Wide Sargasso Sea. Despite all the acclaim those books earned, the writer herself rated this extremely creepy 124 page crime novel as her best.

In it, the garishly clad Lise sets off to travel from her home in Northern Europe to, apparently, meet a boyfriend in a city that sounds a lot like Rome.

She takes a seat on the airplane between two men. One is charmed by her, the other disturbed.

What follows is a tense psychological thriller with echoes of Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith.

Simenon claimed to write his Inspector Maigret novels in 10 days. That was probably an exaggeration, but the Belgian novelist certainly liked to keep his books to a moderate length, and few of his stories of the empathetic French policeman run to more than 160 pages.

Usually the inspector is confined to gray and rainy Paris, but in this 1949 mystery— one of the best in the series—he takes the famous Train Bleu down to the Cote D’Azur to investigate the slaying of a minor crook on a sun-drenched Mediterranean island.

To add to the amusement, he’s accompanied by a tweedy Scotland Yard detective who was chasing the dead man in London.

Simenon evokes the atmosphere of the South of France so wonderfully you can almost smell the sizzling garlic, lavender, and black tobacco smoke, and the interplay between the two investigators is constantly entertaining.

Matsumoto is one of the acknowledged masters of Japanese mystery fiction, the author of classics such as Tokyo Express and Inspector Imanishi Investigates.

In this pared-down novel from 1982, a brilliant defense lawyer, Takukichi Sahara, takes on an apparently unwinnable case: defending a young woman with a shady past whose much older (and richer) husband died when their car plunged into the sea.

Is the widow the gold-digging femme fatale that the prosecution claims her to be? And if she is not, how can Sahara convince the jury of it?

Tense and stylish with barely a wasted word, Suspicion is a great introduction to Matsumoto’s work.

Mick Herron’s modern espionage novels, Slough House, have won justifiable acclaim. They focus on a group of MI5 agents who have been sent into exile in a rundown London office.

The books generally revolve around scabrous spook genius, Jackson Lamb (played superbly by Gary Oldman in the TV adaptation). The grotesque Lamb is conspicuous by his absence in this slim 105 page tale.

Instead, the protagonist is John Bachelor, a hapless, lonely, and usually drunk spy who finds himself caught up in a devious scheme involving the press, a member of the British Royal Family, and a dead billionaire sex-trafficker.

Any similarity to real life events is, of course, coincidental.