Sherlock or Poirot?

Which of them deserves to be crowned the best detective in fiction?

As regular readers of this column will know, I am a huge fan of detective fiction. Give me a good murder mystery and I will shut myself up for the rest of the day, gobbling it up greedily, devouring every plot twist, chewing on each red herring, and drinking in the denouement with delight. 

So you can imagine my joy when I managed to lay my grasping little hands on the latest Anthony Horowitz. The author first brought his brand of magic to the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre with House of Silk. And now he’s dealing with the period immediately after Sherlock’s famous ‘demise’ at the Reichenbach Falls. The book is called Moriarty and that is all I am willing to say at this point, lest I be accused (yet again!) of planting spoilers.

But as I galloped across the pages at breakneck speed, I began to wonder: Is Sherlock Holmes the most popular fictional detective of all time? There must be at least four if not five generations now who have been brought up marveling at his deductive skills and intuitive insights. And yet his charm – or rather the talent of his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – never seems to fade. Re-read The Hound of Baskervilles today and you will feel that familiar chill run down your spine. But if you give Holmes first place then who else would feature in the top ten?

So this Sunday morning, here’s my list of the top ten detectives in fiction. Needless to say, this is an entirely subjective list based entirely on my own preferences and, dare I say, prejudices. Feel free to compile and share your own and we’ll take a crack at making a more universal, comprehensive one!

But speaking for myself, this is how the list would go.

1) Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle): The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was what I grew up on, cutting my detective-fiction-loving teeth on an impressively bound volume of Conan Doyle’s collected works that belonged to my grandfather. When I re-read these stories on my Kindle these days, they evoke memories of sunlit afternoons in the verandah of my childhood home, the wonder I experienced as a child at a story well told, and my absolute awe at Holmes’ many exploits.

2) Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie): His giant ego, his French-accented English, his little eccentricities, his luxuriant moustache, and those ‘leetle grey cells’ all combined to make Poirot one of the most recognizable creatures of detective fiction. (Though I must confess that these days when I think Poirot, I see David Suchet!)

3) Thomas Lynley (Elizabeth George): Lord Lynley, or the 8th Earl of Asherton to give him his full title, is the archetypal tortured genius. He is estranged from his mother, his brother has a drug problem, his rash driving has crippled his closest friend, Simon St James, who is now married to Deborah, who used to be love in Lynley. If that isn’t enough stuff for psychological drama, you have Lynley’s on-off relationship with Lady Helen Clyde and his volatile partnership with his working class Detective Sergeant, Barbara Havers. All that before you even add on a murder mystery!

4) Guido Brunetti (Donna Leon): The best part of this detective series is that it is set in Venice, and the city’s beauty is apparent at every turn. Guido Brunetti is that stranger to detective fiction: a good family man. He lives life the Italian way, going home every afternoon for a three-course meal with his wife, Paola, and their kids, Raffi and Chiara. He counts on his aristocratic father-in-law, Comte Falier, for insights into Venetian high society, and by way of light reading, dips into the writings of the Roman historian, Pliny.

5) Adam Dalgliesh (P. D. James): How can you not love a detective who is also a poet? A cerebral, quiet, thoughtful, intensely private man who brings his subtle intellect to bear on the most knotted of cases and untangles them with gentlemanly ease. If that ticks all your boxes, than Dalgliesh’s your man.


6) Aurelio Zen (Michael Dibdin): He’s a bit of a mess really. With a complicated love life, an ageing mother, and a propensity to land himself in near-death encounters in various scenic parts of Italy. This is an anti-hero you find yourself rooting for despite yourself.

7) Cordelia Grey (P.D. James): She is the one character that I wish James had made more of. Grey has so much potential. Shaped by a peripatetic childhood, she has worked at all kinds of odd jobs till she ends up in a private detective agency, which she inherits when her mentor dies. If anyone deserves another outing among fictional detectives, it is Cordelia Grey. 


8) Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L Sayers): The original prototype for Lord Lynley, Lord Wimsey (later the Duke of Denver) is an amateur detective, whose whimsical, slightly foolish manner, conceal a sharp, deductive mind. Think upper-class fop crossed with Hercule Poirot.

9) Miss Marple (Agatha Christie): We’ve all known someone like her. That ageing busybody who pokes her nose in everyone business, and keeps a close watch on proceedings from behind her twitching curtain. But it’s an absolute joy to read what Christie makes of her.


10) Kay Scarpetta (Patricia Cornwell): The medical examiner as detective was an unusual conceit when Cornwell came out with her first book, Post Mortem, in 1990. But what I like best about Scarpetta is her brisk, almost brusque, take-no-prisoners attitude, which in recent novels, she has transmitted to her computer genius neice, Lucy Farinelli.

Murder, she wrote

The spirit of Agatha Christie lives on…in a new Hercule Poirot book by Sophie Hannah

It probably marks me out as irredeemably middle-brow, but I am a complete and utter devotee of Agatha Christie. The queen of the intricately-plotted murder mystery, Christie is a past mistress of setting the scene just so, littering the story with red herrings, before pulling together all the clues (and false clues) together in a denouement that I never ever saw coming. I read my first Christie when I was still at school, and ever since, I pull out her books every couple of years or so to re-read them, just so that I can experience once again the thrill that I felt when I first came upon them. And Christie, bless her dear departed soul, never disappoints.

Of the two staples of her fiction, I always preferred Hercule Poirot, the quirky, eccentric, French-expostulating, terrifying bright, and brilliantly (or should that be Brilliantined?) moustachioed Belgian detective, to the English spinster, Miss Marple, whose inquisitive disposition and propensity to meddle made me feel positively squeamish on occasion. So, you can imagine my delight when I read that Hercule Poirot was being brought back to life by the Christie estate, with his new adventure being assigned to the British writer, Sophie Hannah, who is quite the dab hand at writing psychological crime thrillers.

I have been a fan of Hannah as well, though she doesn’t inspire the same devotion as Christie, but I wasn’t quite sure if she could bring the spirit of Christie and the personality of Poirot come alive once again on paper. Well, I have just finished reading The Monogram Murders (as it always is with every ‘Agatha Christie’, in one greedy gulp) and I am happy to report that, for the most part, Hannah succeeds very well indeed.

The turning-and-twisting plot is worthy of Christie herself, the portrayal of Hercule Poirot is dead-on (is it just me who can never read the name without conjuring up the image of David Suchet in my head?), and Hannah – a big Christie fan herself – does a splendid job of conjuring up the atmosphere of England between the two wars, a society in flux in which the old moral certainties are fraying rapidly. Where she fails is in replicating the classic simplicity of a Christie whodunit. The devices are all intact but the plot is much too convoluted and the denouement stretches credulity a tad. That said, I was glad to have read the book and sad when it finished – which is sometimes all you can ask of a novel.

But would the story have worked just as well if the detective had been an Italian called Gianni Pirelli? And if the only author credited was Sophie Hannah? Yes, it would. And perhaps it would have worked better because the reader wouldn’t constantly be referencing Agatha Christie in his or her head.

Which brings me to this week’s question: does it make sense to rework old classics by having them reinvented by new authors? Or should we leave them well alone?

Speaking for myself, I always believed that classics were best left well alone. If you needed to tell a story, why not do it with through characters that you had dreamed up? Why cannibalize those that had their birth in other people’s imaginations?

What made me change my mind was P.D. James’s homage to Pride and Prejudice, a murder mystery called Death Comes to Pemberley. This opens six years after the protagonists of Jane Austen’s magnum opus, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, have married and settled down to blissful matrimony in their sprawling Derbyshire estate, Pemberley. They are all set to host the autumn ball when an ugly, violent death intrudes upon their perfect ordered world.

Like all P.D. James’s suspense thrillers, this one was immaculately crafted as well, but what brought particular pleasure to an Austen fan like me was the glimpse into the married life of Mr and Mrs Darcy, now the proud parents of two young boys. For all of us who wonder what happens after the happily ever after, this was a big bonus, indeed.

For some reason, of all of Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice is the one that exercises the maximum hold on our hearts. But even so, it took particular guts and an amazing leap of imagination for Jo Baker to write Longbourn, the book that tells us the story of the servants who served the Bennet household. And it worked because Baker didn’t just indulge in Upstairs-Downstairs conceit, but instead fleshed out the staff as living, breathing characters with stories of their own (though I still haven’t forgiven her for the needless calumny heaped on poor, old Mr Bennet – no sorry, I’m not telling, you’ll just have to find out for yourself!)   

But while these may be triumphs of imagination over hope, do all such recastings of old classics work? I have never been a fan of Ian Fleming – or James Bond, for that matter – but those who love the spy with a license to kill tell me that William Boyd’s recreation of James Bond is immeasurably superior to that of Jeffrey Deaver’s.

For my part, I have just discovered Jill Paton Walsh’s resurrection of those legendary characters of detective fiction, Lord Peter Wimsey (later the Duke of Denver) and Harriet Vane, created by the inimitable Dorothy L Sayers. And I have a horrid suspicion that they are going to keep terribly busy in the foreseeable future.