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- The Daughter of Time. Joséphine Tey. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard becomes fascinated with Richard III, a venomous hunchback who may have killed his brother’s children to secure his crown during Tudor England.
- An Instance of the Fingerpost. Iain Pears. Is it possible to remember events falsely? In the 1660s, when an Oxford don is murdered, each witness points to a different culprit...
- Dissolution. C. J. Sansom. In Tudor England, when a royal commissioner is brutally murdered in a monastery, Henry VIII’s feared vicar general summons fellow reformer Matthew Shardlake to lead the inquiry.
- Atonement. Ian McEwan. In 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister and her sister's childhood friend.
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.
- Spoils of Victory (Mason Collins, #2) by John A. Connell (Goodreads Author)
- Crocodile on the Sandbank (Amelia Peabody #1) by Elizabeth Peters.
- Mistress of the Art of Death (Mistress of the Art of Death, #1) by Ariana Franklin.
People also ask
What are the best historical crime novels?
What is the best mystery novel of all time?
Are historical mystery books worth it?
Can historical crime fiction be marketable?
- 1 – The Ancient World
- 2 – The Middle Ages
- 3 – The 16th Century
- 4 – The 18th Century
- 5 – The Victorian Era
- 6 – The Early 20th Century
- 7 – The 1920s
- 8 – World War II
- 9 – The 1950s
- 10 – The 1970s
The Jupiter Myth by Lindsey Davis For many years Lindsey Davis has been one of the most reliable names in the realms of the historical thriller – few would argue with the proposition that she is the market leader in the ‘crime in Ancient Rome’ subgenre. Her books featuring the intelligent Roman sleuth Falco marry a great deal of authentic-seeming h...
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco Without the Italian author Umberto Eco and his monumental, highly influential novel The Name of the Rose (published in English in 1983), the whole modern notion of historical crime fiction as a distinct, marketable entity might not exist. Though its length and daunting nature have ensured that there are plenty of...
Heartstone by CJ Sansom Setting Heartstone in Tudor England, CJ Sansom is the gold standard for historical crime fiction. A variety of writers elbow for position at the top of the tree, but for many aficionados one name has maintained an unassailable pole position for some considerable time: the British novelist CJ Sansom, a man who shuns the limel...
The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson Antonia Hodgson proved with her first novel, The Devil in the Marshalsea, that she was, at a stroke, one of the most impressive practitioners of historical crime fiction, fully deserving the breathless encomium from Jeffery Deaver on the jacket. Her territory is London in 1727, and her protagonist, Tom...
The Printer’s Coffin by MJ Carter MJ (Miranda) Carter’s writing career has taken off on surprising tangents: biography (a book on the duplicitous Anthony Blunt), history (The Three Emperors), then a header into ripping yarn territory with the deliriously enjoyable The Strangler Vine, which fused Wilkie Collins with Sax Rohmer via Conan Doyle. That ...
Dead Man’s Blues by Ray Celestin With a variety of unlikely real-life figures being dragooned as sleuths in crime fiction, perhaps jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong is not such a stretch – Ray Celestin’s remarkable and much-acclaimed debut novel places him as one of a group on the trail of a serial axe murderer in early 20th century New Orleans. The A...
A Necessary Evil by Abir Mukherjee Abir Mukherjee’s first Captain Sam Wyndham novel, A Rising Man, was widely praised as an odyssey into the dark underbelly of the British Raj in 1919. In his second, equally successful novel, A Necessary Evil, the heir to the throne of a fabulously wealthy kingdom is both liberal and a moderniser and has (unsurpris...
A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr Kerr’s striking Berlin Noir trilogy featured the German detective Bernie Gunther both before and after World War II. In the later A Man Without Breath, the year is 1943. Bernie has a new job at the German War Crimes Bureau in Berlin. There are unsettling reports of a mass grave in a forest near Smolensk, rumours ...
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith Forget the underachieving film with its cod Russian accents — Child 44 is a wonderfully accomplished novel. The setting is the Soviet Union in the year 1953. Stalin’s reign of terror is at its height, and those who stand up against the might of the state vanish into the labour camps – or vanish altogether. With this backgr...
The Red Riding Quartet by David Peace Toweringly original, gritty and groundbreaking, David Peace’s magnum opus remains the celebrated and influential Red Riding Quartet (successfully adapted for television), beginning with the caustic Nineteen Seventy Four and Nineteen Seventy Seven and continuing with Nineteen Eighty and Nineteen Eighty Three. Th...
Dec 20, 2021 · I’ve gone with my favorites (well, 17 favorites) and separated them into best historical mystery series and standalone historical mystery books — including historical detective fiction, Victorian mystery novels, and crime books. So dive in and marathon a series or take a short hop into a time period with these excellent historical mysteries.
- A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee. Calcutta, 1919. Former Scotland Yard Detective Captain Sam Wyndham, along with Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee, is tasked with solving the murder of a senior British official, but instead finds himself embroiled in the politics of a colony under British rule.
- The Silver Pigs by Lindsay Davis. In Rome in AD 70, laid-back informer and imperial agent Marcus Didius Falco is on the hunt for the killer.
- Miss Austen Investigates by Jessica Bull. Hampshire, 1795. A young Jane Austen attends a local ball, but the merriment is cut short when a dead body is found in a closet.
- The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. Boston, 1865. When a serial killer goes on a rampage through Boston and Cambridge, a group of elite scholars realise he is mimicking Hell’s punishments in Dante’s Inferno.
Jan 26, 2023 · 25 Historical Crime, Mystery, and Horror Novels to Look Forward To In 2023. Sorry Gen X: the 90s are now fair game for historical fiction. January 26, 2023 By Molly Odintz. Last year’s historical fiction was all about the 60s, baby, while this year’s features more from the 1950s, the long 19th century, and the 1970s.
Aug 2, 2019 · Do you like your historical fiction with a side of murder, theft, and extortion? From medieval times to the Victorian era and all the way through the 1950s, we’ve compiled a list of historical crime novels that will make you glad you live in the modern era of technology and forensics!
