In what is known as the Golden Age of detective fiction (1920-1939), women writers took the spotlight. The quintet of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh starred brightly during this era. The novelist focuses on a crime (typically a murder) and criminal, a victim, and a detective who resolves the crime through deduction, an examination of clues, and in some cases, a reconstruction of the crime itself. These mysteries have been called classical, traditional, or cozy, as well as village mystery, domestic malice, or Golden Age mystery.

Agatha Christie’s books have been published, translated, purchased, and read more than any others except The Bible, and The Mousetrap continues as the longest running play in London. Her position as the world’s most famous modern mystery writer remains unchallenged. The Mysterious Affairs at Styles, one of the most polished first mysteries ever penned, won her immediate recognition. Her detectives were an eccentric lot and unlike the upper-class, Oxbridge-educated, socially-prominent male detective. Hercule Poirot is an egg-shaped, retired Belgian policeman; Jane Marple is an elderly, English spinster; Ariadne Oliver is a scatterbrained middle-aged woman novelist; and Tuppence and Tommy Beresford, are an ex-nurse and an intelligence agent.

Dorothy L. Sayers keeps at the heart of her detective fiction, the upper-class, Oxbridge-educated, socially prominent, eccentric, heroic male detective. Lord Peter Wimsey is a thoughtful, introspective man, not the silly man-about-town that he could have easily become and affiliates himself with an official policeman, Charles Parker. And in mystery writer, Harriet Vane, Lord Peter has an intelligent, independent wife. Marjory Allingham’s Albert Campion follows a similar character pattern.
(Great Women Mystery Writers, ed. Kathleen Gregory Klein, 1994 & Sequels, 3rd ed. Janet & Jonathan Husband, 1997)

The following is a list of titles by both Agatha Christie & Dorothy L. Sayers. Whenever possible, the series is in order of publication date. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and please let us know if you feel that a title should be here. Many short story compilations were left off this list.

Agatha Christie
Hercule Poirot
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
Murder on the Links (1923)
Poirot Investigates (1923)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
Big Four (1927)
The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)
Peril at End House (1932)
Lord Edgeware Dies (1932) (AKA 13 at Dinner) (1933)
Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
Murder In Three Acts (1934)
The ABC Murders (1934)
Death In the Air (AKA Death in the Clouds) (1935)
Murder In Mesopotamia (1936)
Cards on the Table (1936)
Poirot Loses a Client (1937)
Dead Man’s Mirror (1937)
Death on the Nile (1937)
Appointment With Death (1937)
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
(AKA Holiday for Murder or Murder for Christmas) (1938)
Regatta Mystery (1939)
Sad Cypress (1940)
Patriotic Death. Not in NOBLE. Out of Print. (1940)
Evil Under the Sun (1941)
Murder In Retrospect (AKA 5 Little Pigs) (1943)
The Hollow (AKA Murder After Hours) (1946)
Labours of Hercules (1947)
There is a Tide (AKA Taken at the Flood) (1948)
The Underdog & Other Stories (1951)
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead (1952)
Funerals Are Fatal (AKA After the Funeral) (1953)
Hickory Dickory Dock (1955)
Dead Man’s Folly (1956)
Cat Among the Pigeons (1959)
Adventures of the Christmas Pudding (1960)
Double Sin and Other Stories (1961)
The Clocks (1963)
Dumb Witness (1965)
Third Girl (1966)
Halloween Party (1969)
Elephants Can Remember (1972)
Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases (1974)
Curtain (1975)
Hercule Poirot’s Casebook (1984)
Black Coffee w/Charles Osborne (1998)

Miss Jane Marple
The Tuesday Club Murders (AKA Thirteen Problems) (1928)
Murder at the Vicarage (1930)
The Body in the Library (1942)

The Moving Finger (1943)
The Mousetrap and Other Stories
(AKA Three Blind Mice) (1950)
Murder With Mirrors (AKA They Do It With Mirrors) (1952)
Pocket Full of Rye (1953)
4:50 From Paddington (AKA What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw) (1957)
The Mirror Crack’d (1962)
A Caribbean Mystery (1964)
At Bertram’s Hotel (1965)
Nemesis (1971)
Sleeping Murder (1976)
Miss Marple, the Complete Short Stories (1985)

Tuppence & Tommy Beresford
The Secret Adversary (1922)
Partners in Crime (1929)
N or M? (1941)
By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968)
Postern of Fate (1973)

Aridane Oliver & Parker Pyne
Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective (1934)
The Pale Horse (1961)

Non-Series
The Man in the Brown Suit (1924)
The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1930)
Murder at the Hazelmoor (AKA Sittaford Mystery) (1931)
The Hound of Death and Other Stories (1933)
The Listerdale Mystery (1934)
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (1934)
The Man in the Brown Suit (AKA Boomerang Clue) (1935)
And Then There Were None (AKA Ten Little Indians) (1939)
Sparkling Cyanide (AKA Remembered Death) (1945)
Death Comes As the End (1945)
Witness for the Prosecution & Other Stories (1948)
Crooked House (1949)
They Came to Baghdad (1951)
So Many Steps to Death (AKA Destination Unknown) (1954)
Ordeal By Innocence (1958)
Endless Night (1967)
Passenger to Frankfurt, An Extravaganza (1970)
The Golden Ball and Other Stories (1971)
Spider’s Web w/Charles Osborne (2000)

Dorothy L. Sayers
Lord Peter Wimsey
Whose Body? (1923)
Clouds of Witness (1926)
Unnatural Death (1927)
Lord Peter Views the Body (1928)
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) With Harriet Vane
Strong Poison (1930)
The Five Red Herrings (AKA Suspicious Characters) (1931) With Harriet Vane
Have His Carcase (1931)
Hangman’s Holiday (1932)
Murder Must Advertise (1933)
The Nine Tailors (1934) With Harriet Vane
Gaudy Night (1935) With Harriet Vane
Busman’s Honeymoon (1937)
In the Teeth of the Evidence: Short Stories (1939)
Lord Peter, A Collection of All the Peter Wimsey Stories (1972)
Continues Series
Thrones, Dominations w/Jill Paton Walsh (1998)
Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh (2003)

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