Authors Like Agatha Christie

Dorothy L. Sayers

British · b. 1893 · Crime novelist

Sayers introduced the aristocratic amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey in Whose Body? (1923) and the crime novelist Harriet Vane in Strong Poison (1930), in which Wimsey has weeks to save her from the gallows. She was among the first women to be granted an Oxford degree, in 1920, worked as an advertising copywriter at S. H. Benson until 1929 (the setting of Murder Must Advertise, 1933), and was a founder member of the Detection Club in 1930 alongside Christie. She later translated Dante.

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Ngaio Marsh

New Zealander · b. 1895 · Crime novelist

Marsh wrote 32 detective novels featuring Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard, beginning with A Man Lay Dead (1934). She was also a theatre director in Christchurch, staging Shakespeare with the Canterbury University College Drama Society from 1942, and several of her mysteries are set among actors, including Enter a Murderer (1935), Opening Night (1951) and her last, Light Thickens (1982). She was made a Dame in 1966 and named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1978.

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Margery Allingham

British · b. 1904 · Crime novelist

Allingham's detective Albert Campion first appeared as a minor character in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), and early readers took him for a parody of Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey; he went on to 18 novels as a vague-seeming upper-class man working under an assumed name. Her husband, Philip Youngman Carter, helped plot the interwar books and finished her last one after her death in 1966. The Tiger in the Smoke, set in a fog-bound London, is often counted her best novel.

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Arthur Conan Doyle

Scottish · b. 1859 · Novelist

Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in A Study in Scarlet (1887), and the short stories that followed in The Strand Magazine fixed the shape of the detective story for the next century: the brilliant observer, the admiring friend who narrates, and the reader invited to keep up. Christie read the early Holmes stories with her sister Madge, who later challenged her to write a detective story of her own.

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P.D. James

British · b. 1920 · Crime novelist

James introduced Adam Dalgliesh, a Scotland Yard commander who is also a published poet, in Cover Her Face (1962), and wrote the books while working for a London hospital board and then the Home Office. Shroud for a Nightingale, set in a nurses' training school, won the CWA Silver Dagger. She was made a life peer in 1991, received the CWA Diamond Dagger in 1987, and wrote a short history of the genre, Talking About Detective Fiction (2009).

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Ruth Rendell

British · b. 1930 · Crime novelist

Rendell wrote the Inspector Wexford series from From Doon with Death (1964) onwards, and a long run of standalone psychological crime novels, some under the name Barbara Vine; the first Vine novel, A Dark-Adapted Eye, won the Edgar Award in 1987. A Judgement in Stone opens by telling you the murderer and the motive: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.” She was made a life peer in 1997 and openly disliked Christie's books.

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Richard Osman

British · b. 1970 · Crime novelist

Osman, the co-creator and long-time co-presenter of the BBC quiz show Pointless, published The Thursday Murder Club in 2020: four residents of the Coopers Chase retirement village in Kent, one of them a former spy, investigate murders the police would rather they left alone. It was the UK's number-one Christmas bestseller, a first for a debut novelist, and the series reached its fifth book, The Impossible Fortune, in 2025. A Netflix film followed in August 2025.

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Anthony Horowitz

British · b. 1955 · Novelist

Horowitz wrote scripts for ITV's Agatha Christie's Poirot, created Foyle's War and wrote for Midsomer Murders. Magpie Murders contains a complete 1950s village mystery featuring the detective Atticus Pünd, wrapped inside a contemporary story about the editor who discovers its final chapter is missing; Moonflower Murders and Marble Hall Murders (2025) repeat the trick. He has also written Sherlock Holmes and James Bond novels for those authors' estates.

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Louise Penny

Canadian · b. 1958 · Crime novelist

Penny worked for about eighteen years as a CBC radio host and journalist before publishing Still Life (2005), the first of her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novels, set mostly in the fictional Quebec village of Three Pines. Still Life won the CWA New Blood Dagger, and she has since won the Agatha Award, named for Christie, five times. The series reached The Black Wolf in 2025.

Yukito Ayatsuji

Japanese · b. 1960 · Mystery novelist

In The Decagon House Murders, seven members of a university mystery club, known to each other by the names of Western crime writers — Agatha, Carr, Ellery, Leroux, Orczy, Poe and Van Dine — spend a week on an island where a murder was never solved, and begin to die one by one. The novel is widely credited with starting Japan's shin honkaku (“new orthodox”) movement, a return to the classic puzzle. Ho-Ling Wong's English translation appeared in 2015 and was reissued by Pushkin Vertigo in 2020.