Authors Like P. D. James

Wilkie Collins

English · The Woman in White (1860), The Moonstone (1868)

Collins was born in London in 1824 and was a friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens, whose magazine All the Year Round serialised The Woman in White in 1859–60. The novel, in which a young heiress is shut in an asylum under another woman’s name, is told by several narrators in turn; The Moonstone is often called one of the first English detective novels. He died in 1889.

Dorothy L. Sayers

English · 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 →

Josephine Tey

Scottish · Miss Pym Disposes (1946), The Franchise Affair (1948), The Daughter of Time (1951)

Tey was the pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896–1952) of Inverness, who also wrote plays as Gordon Daviot. In The Daughter of Time, Inspector Alan Grant, confined to a hospital bed, has friends bring him documents to test whether Richard III murdered the Princes in the Tower; in 1990 the Crime Writers’ Association named it the greatest crime novel of all time. Miss Pym Disposes is set in a women’s physical training college.

Ruth Rendell

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

Rendell (1930–2015) wrote more than sixty novels, including the Inspector Wexford series that began with From Doon with Death in 1964. Under the name Barbara Vine she wrote slower psychological novels about family secrets; A Dark-Adapted Eye won the Edgar Award for best novel. She became a Labour life peer in 1997; she and James, a Conservative peer, were friends who, Rendell said, never discussed their writing.

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Colin Dexter

English · Last Bus to Woodstock (1975), The Wench is Dead (1989), The Remorseful Day (1999)

Dexter (1930–2017) taught classics until deafness made him retire in 1966, then worked for the University of Oxford’s local examinations board until 1988. His Inspector Morse, irascible and devoted to crosswords, real ale and Wagner, appears in thirteen novels from Last Bus to Woodstock to The Remorseful Day. He won two Gold Daggers and, in 1997, the Cartier Diamond Dagger that James had received ten years earlier.

Elizabeth George

American · A Great Deliverance (1988), A Suitable Vengeance (1991), A Slowly Dying Cause (2025)

George was born in Warren, Ohio, in 1949 and sets her novels in England. Her detective, Inspector Thomas Lynley of Scotland Yard, is in private life the Earl of Asherton, and works with Sergeant Barbara Havers, who is from a very different class. The 22nd Lynley novel, A Slowly Dying Cause, was published in September 2025.

Henning Mankell

Swedish · Faceless Killers (1991), Sidetracked (1995), The Troubled Man (2009)

Mankell (1948–2015) wrote ten novels about Inspector Kurt Wallander, beginning with Faceless Killers (English 1997); Sidetracked won the British CWA Gold Dagger in 2001. From 1986 he was artistic director of the Teatro Avenida in Maputo and spent long periods in Mozambique. In 2010 he was aboard the Gaza Freedom Flotilla when Israeli commandos boarded it, and afterwards called for sanctions against Israel.

Tana French

Irish · In the Woods (2007), The Likeness (2008), Broken Harbour (2012)

French was born in Vermont in 1973, grew up partly in Ireland, Italy and Malawi, and trained as an actor at Trinity College Dublin. In the Woods, the first of her Dublin Murder Squad novels, won the Edgar Award for best first novel; each book in the series is narrated by a different detective with something to hide. Broken Harbour is set on a half-empty housing estate after the Irish property crash.

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Raymond Chandler

American-British · The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Long Goodbye (1953)

Chandler (1888–1959) was born in Chicago, educated at Dulwich College in London, and wrote his novels about the Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe. In “The Simple Art of Murder”, published in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1944, he attacked the English classic detective story for its contrived plots, named Sayers among the writers he took on, and praised Dashiell Hammett for realism.

Margaret Atwood

Canadian · The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Blind Assassin (2000), The Testaments (2019)

Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939. The Handmaid’s Tale imagines a theocracy, Gilead, in which fertile women are forced to bear children for the ruling class. She has won the Booker Prize twice, for The Blind Assassin (2000) and, jointly with Bernardine Evaristo, for The Testaments (2019).

Every book by Margaret Atwood →