100 Greatest Literary Detectives - by Eric Sandberg (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book identifies the most noteworthy sleuths from around the world, outlining the distinctive features of the detective, his or her approach to crime solving, and highlights of their fictional careers. A case is made for each detective's greatness based on literary importa...

Book Synopsis

This book identifies the most noteworthy sleuths from around the world, outlining the distinctive features of the detective, his or her approach to crime solving, and highlights of their fictional careers. A case is made for each detective's greatness based on literary importance, novelty, uniqueness, aesthetic quality, and cultural resonance.

Review Quotes

This anthology of 100 critical profiles of fictional detectives rounds up the usual suspects and introduces some less familiar figures who will surely provoke discussion among crime connoisseurs. Warning that it would be impossible to include every reader's favorite gumshoe, editor Sandberg includes essays on an eclectic selection of crime-solvers from the past two centuries. Along with Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, there is coverage of Brother William of Baskerville, the 14th-century monk sleuth in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. In addition to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, both iconic hardboiled detectives, there are Philip K. Dick's Bob Arctor (from A Scanner Darkly) and China Miéville's Inspector Tyador Borlú (from The City and the City), both crossovers from speculative fiction. Among essays on Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins, Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, and Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta, there is also one on Daniel Quinn, the failed detective of Paul Auster's metafictional New York Trilogy. The book's contributors, mostly academics, cite chapter and verse from novels and stories to provide cogent and involving studies, driving home Sandberg's central point that crime fiction favors character as much as plot.


This enormously important gift to scholars, edited by Eric Sandberg, sets a benchmark for scholars and scholarship in detective literary fiction. The excellent 7-page Introduction focuses much needed attention on, and gives poignant recognition to, this literary stepchild. This reference volume may in fact be a catalyst that moves detective literature from literary stepchild status to provide it a genuine and legitimate place in literary scholarship. . . This excellent monograph should be added to academic library collections from high school through community college and university. Large public libraries and special libraries that serve fiction readers should also acquire this resource.

About the Author

Eric Sandberg is an assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong and has published and presented extensively on twentieth and twenty-first century literature Sandburg is the coeditor of Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige (2017) and the author of Virginia Woolf: Experiments in Character (2014).