Classic Private-Eye Detective Novels: A Starter Pack

When private-eye stories first started appearing in pulp magazines like “Black Mask,” they were just OK. It took a former Pinkerton operative with a stripped-down style and a fiery rage roiling underneath to make art out of pulp, as Dashiell Hammett did in dozens of stories and a handful of novels. Chances are, when picking up “The Maltese Falcon,” you’ll think of the movie with Humphrey Bogart, but Hammett’s private eye, Sam Spade, is a rougher animal who knows when he’s being played for a sap, and definitely doesn’t let romantic feelings get in the way of the truth.

Crime fiction readers often gravitate toward Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Hammett is more my speed, but I’m always awe-struck by Chandler’s depictions of a dissipated Los Angeles and its doomed populace, which is on fullest display in this book — his longest and best outing featuring the private eye Philip Marlowe, who tries to stay morally upright in an increasingly corrupt world.

Ross Macdonald was the rightful heir to Chandler and Hammett, though it took a few books for his private eye, Lew Archer, to find his footing. “Galton” merged all of Macdonald’s real-life compulsions, obsessions and tragedies — including the troubles of his only daughter, Linda — into a close psychological study of human behavior, and how generations of family tragedy can’t help but inform the present. It’s territory that he would plumb in all his subsequent novels.

This novel — one of the best hard-boiled private-eye novels ever written — features the distinctly original Jim Sader, who works the seedy corners of Long Beach, Calif. “He wondered fleetingly why it seemed so often to be dirty linen which was brought to him. Why couldn’t he be asked, once, to run down a missing masterpiece?” Unsavory or not, a job’s a job, and Sader will do whatever needs to be done.

Paretsky’s private eye, V.I. Warshawski — once described by The New York Times as a “tough, sexy, karate-chopping hero” — is far more than Philip Marlowe in a skirt; she’s rooted in the social justice and second-wave feminism worlds Paretsky knows well from her own work and life. V.I. made her debut in “Indemnity Only” and has since appeared in 21 more novels.

I adore Spotswood’s series featuring the ace private investigator Lillian Pentecost and her assistant Will Parker. The two of them have an easy yet prickly chemistry, which comes to the forefront when Pentecost is arrested for murder and Parker has to figure out what really happened. Start here, then work your way through the earlier books.

Atkinson’s famous detective Jackson Brodie — who makes his first appearance here investigating a grisly murder case — is well-versed in the art of running away from police work, marriages, children and responsibility. But as the meticulously constructed “Case Histories” demonstrates, he is but one piece of a larger human puzzle, which Atkinson explores brilliantly.

Ellin, a longtime favorite of mine for his rug-pulling suspense stories, wrote several novels, of which this is far and away the best. Murray Kirk isn’t a taciturn private dick: He’s a regular guy investigating crimes in a New York City that feels lived-in and familiar, but very much of its mid-1950s time. He keeps his emotions on ice until he meets the fiancée of a young cop accused of bribery, and then the dam breaks. Kirk emerges a changed man, and so will the reader.

Claire DeWitt, who figures in two more books and several stories, is an iconoclast — the punk rocker of the P.I. world. Investigating the disappearance of a lawyer in New Orleans, she depends heavily on her intuition and the I Ching, often while smoking a little weed.