Ten Crime Authors, their Detectives, and their Je Ne Sais Quoi.

*Ultimately, I would like to read some of these series' all the way through. As usual, I cannot just do one, I am currently working through Reichs, Rankin, Robinson (the three r's was accidental) and Larsson. I'll see how I go with the rest.

1. Raymond Chandler; Philip Marlowe; the quintessential hard-boiled dick, highly moral, a chess and poetry lover, and never fooled by the femme-fatales.
2. S. S. Van Dine; Philo Vance; in keeping with the simply divine names, this crime solver is a foppish dandy, a New York vivant, who loves art, breeds dogs and fences. So Oscar Wilde my darlings.
3. Kathy Reichs; Temperance Brennan; a female forensic anthropologist—she plays with bones—taking the forensic genre one step further. She has her 'dick 'counterpart's problem with alcohol, and contends, on top of all else, with Quebecian French.
4. Dashiell Hammet; Sam Spade; distilled 'dick'. Sam Spade is who you channel when you want to do noir.
5. Stieg Larsson; Lisbeth Salander; the grown up version, according to her author, of Pippy Longstocking. Look where trouble gets you. Photographic memory is a billy-bonus too.
6. Peter Robinson; Detective Inspector Alan Banks. He seems like just your average jo-blow police member. Worked his way up the ranks and out of his wife's affection. Two kids; a little refined; small town England kind of a guy; tough when he has to be.
7. Ian Rankin; Detective Inspector John Rebus. Rebus is the lone, hard-boiled dick transposed into the police force. Police politics and struggles with colleagues are inevitable. Fabulously termed, in Wikipedia (so sorry to use this as a source), Tartan-noir. Love it.
8.James Patterson; Alex Cross. No list of crime writers can be without James Patterson. No single crime writer has the same level of smarts. There is something about him that makes me dislike him immensely. He is not a crime writer, he is a marketing machine. You have to admire him, even if it seems to make writing into business. Any dislike would undoubtably be jealousy. Poo-poohing on account of a detriment to the purity of the form, only envy. Patterson has many protagonists, but possibly the most famous is Alex Cross. African American psychologist who operates a private practise, but moonlights for the Maryland Police Department and FBI. His women often die. A bad guy to date perhaps.
9. Jeffery Deaver; Lincoln Rhyme. Alex Cross reminded me about Lincoln Rhyme. Now, he is an odd protagonist. Exceptionally grumpy, quadraplegic. He can control only his head and shoulders and one finger. He is like no other crime solver that I know. His forte is forensics.
10. Jeff Lindsay; Dexter Morgan. Everone's favourite blood spatter analyst. Everyone's favourite serial killer. Lindsay's protagonist needs to solve crimes while avoiding being caught commiting them—makes for good tension.