10 Undiscovered Gems from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Accountant and elocution teacher, Flynn wrote close to fifty mystery novels. Most of them feature his louche upper-crust private investigator Anthony Bathhurst (a man who certainly wouldn’t need help sounding his aitches).

In this delightfully frothy classic from 1928, Bathhurst finds himself making an unlikely link between a girl poisoned with cyanide, a blackmail plot against a minor European royal, and a mysterious male dancer at an annual hunt ball.

English author, Bush wrote 63 mysteries, all featuring amateur sleuthing duo Ludovic Travers and John Franklin. This knottily plotted novel from 1931 is arguably Bush’s most satisfying book.

The setting is classic Golden Age: A fancy dress ball at a snowbound country house. That four (or possibly five) of the guests are dressed as harlequins adds to the confusion, which is all terribly amusing—until someone is murdered.

American author, Markham was the son of a poet and traveled extensively around Europe in the Roaring Twenties. He wrote nine mysteries in a six-year burst.

All of them are characterized by originality of plotting, none more so than this novel from 1932 which offers a typical Markham twist on the classic “locked room mystery”.

Featuring gangsters, a gentlemen thief, a gun-toting countess and an oddball blackmailer, The Devil Drives is an unexpected, offbeat delight.

Molly Thynne grew up in a well-to-do London household with artistic leanings. Her mother was the cousin of painter James McNeil Whistler and writers Rudyard Kipling and Henry James were regular visitors.

Alongside non-genre fiction, Thynne penned six charming and neatly conceived mysteries between 1928 and 1933. Three of them feature the brilliant Dr. Constantine, a Greek chess expert and amateur sleuth.

In this final outing, Dr. Constantine teams up with his usual sidekick Detective Inspector Arkwright of Scotland Yard to solve the murder of a young aristocrat. Can he really have been killed in an argument over classical music?

In The Golden Age, anything is possible!

Under the pen name E.C.R Lorac, English author Edith Caroline Rivett penned a long-running series of atmospheric mysteries featuring Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald of Scotland Yard.

Lorac was invited to become a member of the celebrated Detection Club in 1936 and she has great fun lampooning some of its members in this 1937 novel.

In it, Macdonald attends an ever-so-clever treasure hunt at the house of a publisher, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of a best-selling, but deeply unpleasant crime novelist.

A genuine classic.

Brooklyn-born author Holding had an influential fan in Raymond Chandler. 

She began her career writing romance, but the need to make money after the 1929 financial crash saw her turning to mystery fiction. She penned 18 detective novels in all.

This one from 1942 is set aboard a luxury ocean liner. Ex-Chorus Girl Honey Stapleton is enjoying a Caribbean cruise with her new husband when she starts to believe that the man in the next cabin is planning to kill his wife.

The only problem is convincing people she’s right before it’s too late.

Tightly written and sharply characterized, there’s little wonder Chandler was an admirer.

Bailey wrote a huge run of short stories featuring upper-class amateur sleuth Reggie Fortune, but most of his full-length mysteries feature the altogether more unusual character of Joshua Clunk—a blustering lawyer who spends his time exposing corruption while all the while profiting from it a little himself.

In The Sullen Sky Mystery, the sanctimonious Clunk is called in by a small-town bigwig to investigate the persecution of a local policeman. Murders follow.

Bailey has a gift for dark comedy and an eye for the absurdity of provincial life.

Agatha Christie was a big fan.

Charles Daly King was a U.S. psychologist with a side hustle in mystery writing. His usual protagonist was detective Michael Lord whose cases are relayed to him by his very own Watson in the shape of Dr. L Rees Pons.

King’s great innovation is to provide an elaborate “cluefinder” at the end of each novel (a device much admired by Ellery Queen) which helps the reader unpick the workings of Lord’s mind.

He kicked off this intriguing style of puzzle mystery with this 1932 novel set aboard a transatlantic cruise ship (always a dangerous holiday to book in mysteryland) on which a man is found dead from both gunshot and poison.

George Bellairs was the pen name of Lancashire bank manager, Harold Blundell. He wrote close to 50 mysteries, most of them featuring veteran Scotland Yard detective Inspector Thomas Littlejohn and many set on the Isle of Man, where Blundell took his holidays.

In this mystery from 1949, Littlejohn investigates the death of a Bishop whose emaciated body has been found at the bottom of a cliff.

A terrific whodunit with enough red herrings to fill the hold of a fishing boat, this is classic British mystery writing.

Irish writer Croft was praised by both Dorothy L. Sayers and Raymond Chandler for the solidity of his plots, which fit together as neatly as a jigsaw.

Croft made his crime-writing debut with The Cask (1920) and in 1929 introduced his most famous creation, the mundanely, ordinary, Inspector Joseph French.

Dogged rather than inspired and possessing nothing of the theatrical flourishes of Holmes or Poirot, French catches his criminals (in this case a gang of international jewel thieves) with diligent attention to detail.

Many credit Croft with inventing the police procedural.