Pretty much all of these authors have good and bad works, and most have a point at which they stop being consistently good, although possibly by that point you’re fond enough of their work to keep reading. Here’s my advice about what to read by them. Please note that I assume you already know these people starting writing nearly a hundred years ago, and the most prolific of them died about fifty years ago. Their beliefs, prejudices and assumptions were different from those common today. This is a big post, and I’m not going to cudgel my brains trying to remember which books contain scenes which would be considered offensive.

-G.K. Chesterton: You either love him or you hate him, and if you hate him, best to ignore him, because your hatred only feeds the trollishness of fans like me, and makes us double down on quoting him at every convenient opportunity. Broadly speaking, the first couple of Father Brown story collections represent the best of his mystery work, but if you decide you like him enough to read any old thing he wrote, there’s lots of material. He just didn’t do novel-length mysteries.

-On a related note, most of the people below wrote enough mystery short stories for a collection or three, and those are generally worth your time, with the exception of Dorothy Sayers’s Montagu Egg stories. HOWEVER, keep in mind that Agatha Christie’s Hound of Death collection is mostly supernatural horror.

-Agatha Christie: one of the most consistently competent authors in the English language: clear, evocative prose, combined with an eye for visual detail and a cynical but observant approach to human nature enables her to mislead, confuse and surprise mystery readers over and over and over again. From The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921) down to and including The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side (1962), pretty much any mystery she wrote is pretty good to very good, and some of the later ones are also interesting, just more hit and miss. If it looks like a spy thriller, lower your expectations, regardless of when it was written, but some of those are traditional mysteries in disguise.

–I personally find the generically smug, wise Miss Marple kind of tiresome and prefer the quirkier M. Hercule Poirot, who was basically the “alien outsider observing the world around him” nearly half a century before Gene Roddenberry invented Mr. Spock. That being said, Miss Marple’s extreme blandness means that the focus is more on the suspects and supporting cast, which were generally Christie’s forte anyway. Tommy and Tuppence don’t do anything for me, but other people like them and it’s probably worth trying them to see what you think. Of the two books written during WWII and released posthumously, Sleeping Murder is a perfectly good standard-issue Miss Marple, while Curtain, though arguably cleverer, is a spiteful teardown of Hastings and Poirot, and probably should be skipped if you become fond of either man.

-Dorothy Sayers: a flashier prose stylist than Christie, but for my money, a less good plotter, and particularly weak when it comes to assembling a decent body of suspects. Still, I enjoy her take on the genre (and some of her nonfiction as well.) And she gets brownie points for knowing when she’d done all she could with the genre, and walking away from it. She takes some flak for flaunting her erudition, but hey, Agatha Christie wrote two whole mysteries that I solved by being conversant with Bullfinch’s Mythology, and I can’t say the same for Sayers, so, there is that.

–For Sayers, skip Whose Body? (1923) It’s a lousy mystery and a lousy introduction to the stylish, self-deprecating, PTSD-ridden Lord Peter Wimsey. Start with The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) and then either doubleback to Unnatural Death (1927) and Clouds of Witness (1926) in that order, if you like howdunnits, or skip Unnatural Death if you don’t. Clouds of Witness shows a lot of his family, and I feel that it’s only interesting once you’ve gotten a feel for Wimsey himself. Proceed to Strong Poison (1930), Murder Must Advertise (1933), Gaudy Night (1935), and Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), in that order. Nine Tailors (1934) is her most ambitious and in some ways unconventional book, and I feel like it works better if you have most of her other novels under your belt. Have His Carcase (1932) and Five Red Herrings (1931) suffer from a lot of wheel-spinning while she follows poorly developed provincial police characters around, but are decent books outside of those stretches. I don’t consider Carcase essential to the development of the Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane love story, because it’s just a bunch of Vane being annoying and neurotic, simultaneously resenting Wimsey and being attracted to him. But if you like her more than I do and want to read it, it falls in between Strong Poison and Gaudy Night. Herrings can be read at any point you decide to be a Sayers completionist. The Wimsey-free Documents in the Case (1930) can be read at any time at all. Ignore the modern continuations by Jill Paton Walsh.

-Margery Allingham: People tend to draw parallels between Sayers’s Wimsey and Allingham’s Albert Campion: both fair-haired, humorous men who pose as upperclass twits. Here’s how you tell them apart: Peter Wimsey’s brand of babbling tends to make him look shallow but not necessarily stupid. Albert Campion’s brand tends to make him look flat-out dumb. Also, Wimsey is shorter, horse-faced, and prone to monocles, while Campion is taller, blander looking, and prone to horn-rimmed glasses. Vive la difference, is all I can say, as a fan of both.

–Campion is a supporting character in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929) and only gradually becomes a clearcut main character over the course of Mystery Mile (1930). Neither of these are great books or particularly good mysteries, although it’s interesting to note that a faction of bad guys in Black Dudley turn out to be guilty of prostituting underaged girls to men for blackmail purposes, at a time when Robert Maxwell was in short pants and his son-in-law, Jeffrey Epstein, was not even a gleam in his grandparents’ eyes. Anyway, it’s safe to skip these first two books and treat Look to the Lady (1931) as the start of the Albert Campion series. From there, the series is pretty consistently good, albeit more baroque and thriller-adjacent than Christie or Sayers, down to and including More Work for the Undertaker (1948). After that, Campion begins to fade back into the woodwork, with Tiger In The Smoke (1952) and Hide My Eyes (1958) being pretty good psychological thrillers that Campion happens to be in and The Mind Readers (1965) being okayish science fiction that he happens to be in. The other post-1948 works by Allingham are forgettable; I am not familiar with the couple of Campion books written by her husband after her death or the continuations by Mike Ripley.

-Georgette Heyer: better known, and rightly so, for her Regency romcoms, Heyer also wrote a smattering of somewhat adequate mysteries and crime thrillers with a contemporary-to-her setting. Footsteps in the Dark (1932) has a plot very familiar to Scooby Doo fans and is amusing at that level. Why Shoot a Butler? (1933) is a mildly interesting romantic suspense novel with the best title ever. Penhallow (1942) is grim literary fiction labeled as a mystery for marketing purposes. They Found Him Dead (1937) and Detection Unlimited (1953) are boooooooooooring. Death in the Stocks (1935) is a great portrayal of the shallow, b****y people Wimsey and Campion are pretending to be, and frankly a more annoying book because of it. The remaining five or so mysteries are mostly flawed in different ways, but qualify as acceptable old school mysteries, in my opinion. I include her here mostly because she’s a well-known author of the time whose mysteries are fairly easy to track down, and some of her characters (see Death in the Stocks, above) shed an interesting sidelight on what the more important mystery writers are doing.

-John Dickson Carr: Noted for his locked-room mysteries, he was kind of a cross between the baroque surrealism of Chesterton and Allingham with the puzzle-plots of Christie…but without Chesterton’s philosophy, Allingham’s compassion for human foibles, or Christie’s psychology. As best I can tell, some combination of his alcoholism and his work for radio ruined him for novels around 1947. I enjoy most of his stuff(1) down to about He Who Whispers (1946), and there’s some books I enjoy even after that, but as with Christie, there’s a pretty obvious point at which he stops being consistently good.

-What about Ngaio Marsh? Rex Stout? Edmund Crispin? Others? All I can say about Marsh, Crispin and Stout is that I don’t like their earliest series novels and although I like some of Marsh’s and Stout’s later works, I haven’t read enough of same to get a sense of whether there’s a specific point where they turn “good.” There’s some other writers I like in this genre, like Patricia Wentworth and ECR Lorac, but I feel like they’re unmistakably second-tier, even compared to the likes of Heyer.

OH, AND DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, READ THE KIND OF BOOK WHERE ONE CHAPTER IS BY CHRISTIE, ONE BY SAYERS, AND SO ON. THEY ARE ALL TERRIBLE.

(1) allowing for my dislike of certain aspects of The Crooked Hinge (1938) and The Burning Court (1937).