Authors Like Ngaio Marsh

Anna Katharine Green

American · The Leavenworth Case (1878)

Green (1846–1935) was born in Brooklyn. The Leavenworth Case, her first novel, was praised by Wilkie Collins and made her a bestselling author; it introduced Ebenezer Gryce of the New York police, who returns in many of her books. In three later novels he is helped by Amelia Butterworth, a nosy society spinster often seen as a prototype for Miss Marple.

Dorothy L. Sayers

British · Strong Poison (1930), Murder Must Advertise (1933), Gaudy Night (1935)

Sayers (1893–1957) was born in Oxford, worked as an advertising copywriter at S. H. Benson in the 1920s and was a founder member of the Detection Club in 1930. Her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, meets the novelist Harriet Vane in Strong Poison and courts her for several books. Critics have documented antisemitic stereotypes in early novels such as Whose Body?.

Every book by Dorothy L. Sayers →

Margery Allingham

British · Police at the Funeral (1931), Death of a Ghost (1934), The Tiger in the Smoke (1952)

Allingham (1904–1966) was born in Ealing and introduced her detective Albert Campion in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929). With Marsh, Sayers and Agatha Christie she is counted among the four Queens of Crime of the Golden Age.

Every book by Margery Allingham →

Josephine Tey

Scottish · The Franchise Affair (1948), Brat Farrar (1949), The Daughter of Time (1951)

Tey was a pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896–1952) of Inverness. As Gordon Daviot she wrote Richard of Bordeaux, which opened in 1932 and ran for a year in the West End with John Gielgud, who became a lifelong friend. In 1990 the Crime Writers’ Association named The Daughter of Time the greatest crime novel of all time.

Michael Innes

Scottish · Death at the President’s Lodging (1936), Hamlet, Revenge! (1937), Lament for a Maker (1938)

Michael Innes was the pen name of J. I. M. Stewart (1906–1994), born in Edinburgh, who studied psychoanalysis in Vienna, taught English in Leeds, Adelaide and Belfast, and was a Student of Christ Church, Oxford, from 1949. His detective, John Appleby, first appears as a Scotland Yard inspector and rises to Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

Simon Brett

British · Cast, In Order of Disappearance (1975), A Nice Class of Corpse (1986), The Body on the Beach (2000)

Brett was born in Surrey in 1945 and worked as a BBC radio producer, producing the pilot of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. His Charles Paris novels follow a jobbing actor who solves murders, and he later wrote the Mrs Pargeter and Fethering series. He was president of the Detection Club from 2000 to 2015 and won the CWA Diamond Dagger in 2014.

Kerry Greenwood

Australian · Cocaine Blues (1989), Earthly Delights (2004)

Greenwood (1954–2025) was born in Footscray, Victoria. Cocaine Blues introduced Phryne Fisher, a wealthy lady detective, and the series became the ABC television drama Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries in 2012. She also wrote the Corinna Chapman series, beginning with Earthly Delights. She died in March 2025.

Stella Duffy

London-born, raised in New Zealand · Calendar Girl (1994), Theodora (2010), Money in the Morgue (with Ngaio Marsh, 2018)

Duffy was born in London in 1963 to a New Zealand father and spent her childhood in Tokoroa, New Zealand. Marsh began Money in the Morgue during the Second World War and abandoned it; Duffy completed it from the title, the first three chapters and Marsh’s notes, and HarperCollins published it in 2018. She is also an improvising performer and an associate artist of the theatre company Improbable.

Ruth Rendell

British · From Doon with Death (1964), A Judgement in Stone (1977), A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986, as Barbara Vine)

Rendell (1930–2015) was born in South Woodford, Essex. Her first novel introduced Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford, and as Barbara Vine she wrote slower psychological novels; A Dark-Adapted Eye won the Edgar Award. In a 1990 interview she dismissed Agatha Christie and Miss Marple.

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Martha Grimes

American · The Man with a Load of Mischief (1981), The Red Queen (2025)

Grimes was born in Pittsburgh in 1931. Her Richard Jury novels, each named after an English pub, follow a Scotland Yard detective and his friend Melrose Plant, an aristocrat who has given up his titles. The Red Queen appeared in 2025.