The crime-solving writer is one of the most (deservingly!) beloved tropes in all of crime fiction—literature, film and television alike. After all, crime-solving offers a thrilling, high-stakes fantasy outlet for the kind of dogged research, fact-checking, and discovery-making at which writers excel. Plus, everyone seems to think that writers have endless free time during the day to do things like take long, boozy lunches with friends or spend a lot of time dwelling on romances and solve murders which baffle the police.
But the writer-detective also embodies a pleasurable collapsing of the key enjoyments of crime fiction itself; the idea that the writer behind a crime novel might be basing the story on a real-life feat offers a very compelling sensation that these exploits might not actually be so far-fetched. It’s not just escapism, it’s also familiarity. Being a writer is seen, perhaps, as the closest thing to actually being on an adventure—it’s a more theoretically accessible fantasy than wishing to be a detective story protagonist, but potentially just as exciting. It also adds a clever, meta-level to the stories, allowing for explicit focuses on process and plotting. Another thing—writers, especially if they are writing the stories they are in, always live to tell their tales.
So, for your pleasure, we have ranked the nineteen best detective-writers that have graced pages and screens (big and small).
19. Phil Blackwood
Appearance: Her Alibi, 1989 [film]
Profile: Poor Phil Blackwood will always be last on our qualitative lists about writers. A detective novelist (Tom Selleck) with writer’s block who visits courthouses to try to find inspiration, he meets and offers to be the alibi for a beautiful young Romanian woman who is on trial for murder. She becomes his muse, but as he writes about her, he discovers that maybe she’s not so innocent. He’s a bad detective… but an even worse writer? He only writes in capital letters, things like: “They kissed. She nearly passed out from the rapture of the moment… but Swift, familiar with this reaction from past encounters, gathered her in his arms as her body went limp, and carried her into his bedroom.”
Detective skills: 1/5
Writing skills: 1/5
18. Richard Harland
Appearance: Leave Her to Heaven, 1945 [film]
Profile: Richard (Cornel Wilde) is a writer who believes he’s struck gold when he encounters Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney), a gorgeous young woman who is totally infatuated with him. He’s not an amazing detective, because by the time he figures out she’s actually an obsessive psychopath, it’s basically too late.
Detective skills: 1/5
Writing skills: 3/5
17. Robert Langdon
Appearance: Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, and subsequent novels, 2000-present (and three films)
Profile: Robert Langdon is Professor of Art History and Symbology (not a real field, but sure) at Harvard University, and for some reason he’s called to solve various dramatic religious crimes throughout Europe. Apparently, he looks like “Harrison Ford in Harris tweed.” He is good at following leads, but the various things he has to pursue aren’t exactly subtle, so it’s unclear how good a detective he really is. He is the author of six books, but they all seem about the same exact thing, so he probably got tenure after book 1. Just a guess.
Detective skills: 2/5
Writing skills: 3/5
16. Holly Martins
Appearance: The Third Man, 1949 [film]
Profile: Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is an American pulp novelist of popular Westerns, but he finds himself in postwar Vienna, investigating the coincidental death of an old friend he was supposed to meet, there. For all his vigorous inquiries, he gets tricked in a major way, and a romantic entanglement with his friend’s ex-girlfriend seriously distracts him from the pursuit of justice.
Detective skills: 2.5/5
Writing skills: 2.5/5
15. Marcus Goldman
Appearance: The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker, 2012 [novel] (and miniseries adaptation)
Profile: Marcus Goldman is a bestselling author looking for his next story. He travels to visit his beloved college professor, Harry Quebert, in New Hampshire. But Quebert has just been linked to the murder of a young woman thirty three years before, and Marcus takes it upon himself to investigate the crime, turning his investigation into his new manuscript. It could be better. A lot of “tell,” not a lot of “show,” Marcus.
Detective skills: 3/5
Writing skills: 2/5
14. Joan Wilder
Appearance: Romancing the Stone, 1984 [film]
Profile: Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) is a romance novelist, whose swashbuckling, presumably sexy books about the fearless Angelina and her dashing cowboy lover Jesse have become enormous bestsellers. She’s also kind of a mess, unlucky in love, rather lonely and definitely afraid of everything—that is, until her sister goes missing in Colombia, and she has to head to South American to deliver the ransom. Along the way, Joan discovers that the kidnappers want a mysterious jewel (which is buried somewhere in the jungle), and she sets off with a cranky American (Michael Douglas) to find it. Maybe this isn’t TECHNICALLY a detective movie, but she does a lot of really good investigating and honestly, who cares—it has the best scene ever of a writer getting recognized while out in the world.
Detective skills: 2/5
Writing skills: 3/5
13. Jughead Jones
Appearance: Riverdale, 2017-present [television]
Profile: Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse) is the brooding, morose lit-boy narrator of Riverdale, the CW’s hit neo-noir television show that offers an alternate adaptation of the Archie Comics universe. The town of Riverdale is a hotbed of every single kind of imaginable (and unimaginable) horror (truly, there are no more sharks left to jump), and Jughead wryly adapts it all in the novel he’s working on. “You know how there are just some towns where bad things always seem to happen?” he writes. “Well, Riverdale has become one of those towns. The most recent horror? The school janitor turned out to be a serial killer. But we were putting him away along with our Christmas decorations.” So, he’s not an amazing writer, but he is a pretty good detective, though his girlfriend Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart) should take most of the credit where that job is concerned.
Detective skills: 4.5/5
Writing skills: 2/5
12. The Ghost
Appearance: The Ghostwriter, 2010 [film]
Profile: The Ghost (Ewan McGregor) is a professional ghostwriter hired to write the autobiography of a former Prime Minister, the disappointedly, un-Britishly named Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). Things are quiet at first, but as he does research into the PM’s life, he discovers a glut of secrets and becomes suspicious that his predecessor-ghostwriter, who died mysteriously, was murdered after finding some very top-secret information. The Ghost isn’t a bad researcher (he uncovers an entire conspiracy) but he is an idiot for telling everyone what he’s finding.
Detective skills: 4/5
Writing skills: 2/5
11. Parashor Barma
Appearance: “Parashor, the Poet-Detective,” and other stories by Premendra Mitra, 1932-1983 [book series]
Profile: Parashor Barma is an absolute genius when it comes to solving crimes, but is sadly a terrible, terrible poet. His magazine editor best friend narrates the Parashor books, and is always stunned how the moody detective can summon the correct answer seemingly out of nowhere. But he almost scorns this talent; his true passion, and the skill he wishes he had, is poetry. Cruel irony.
Detective skills: 5/5
Writing skills: 1/5
10. Mikael Blomkvist
Appearance: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and two sequels novels by Steig Larsson, 2005-2007 (followed by subsequent novels by David Lagercrantz, 2015-present), and a bunch of movies
Profile: Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (libel scandal) is coerced into investigating the decades-ago disappearance of a young girl. He is hired by her wealthy uncle, who in exchange promises to provide Blomkvist with evidence against the man who is trying to put him in jail, proving Blomkvist’s allegations were correct. Blomkvsit pulls off a really amazing investigation with the involvement of a hacker named Lisbeth Salander, then uses her research to publish a best-selling book.
Detective skills: 5/5
Writing skills: 3/5
9. Richard “Rick” Castle
Appearance: Castle, 2009-2016 [television]
Profile: Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) is a best-selling crime novelist (you can read his books in real life!) who becomes a police consultant when a serial killer starts murdering people in ways that imitate the murders in Castle’s books. His goofy playing-fast-and-loose-ish-ness annoys his straight-laced new partner, detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic), but (big surprise) they turn out to be an indomitable team, and Castle starts getting ideas for books (with Beckett his muse) and somehow, the NYPD brings him on as a consultant full-time, afterwards. The show insists that he’s a good writer, but he gets points off for naming his detective protagonist “Nikki Heat.”
Detective skills: 4/5
Writing skills: 2.5/5
8. John Jones/Huntley Haverstock
Appearance: Foreign Correspondent, 1940 [film]
Profile: Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), ace reporter for a big New York City paper, is sent to Europe in the summer of 1939 to report on the rise of fascism, and gets embroiled in a top-secret plot between various European powers in this wartime Hitchcock thriller. Writing under the name Huntley Haverstock, he, another reporter, and the daughter of a diplomat witness the assassination of a Dutch diplomat, and begin unraveling an enormous conspiracy. He’s a pretty good detective (very, very good observational skills! Remember that windmill scene? Well done, Huntley!), and he’s a good enough writer that his editor is positive he’ll get quality material.
Detective skills: 4/5
Writing skills: 3/5
7. Joseph “Rouletabille” Josephin
Appearance: The Mystery of the Yellow Room and subsequent novels by Gaston Leroux, 1907-1922
Profile: Brilliant eighteen-year-old journalist Joseph Josephin is more adept at solving crimes than the police. In his debut, solves an impossible locked room mystery. And he’s so chill about it all that he is given the nickname “Rouletabille,” which is a French idiom meaning “cool-headed.”
Detective skills: 4/5
Writing skills: 4/5
6. Adam Dalgliesh
Appearance: Cover her Face and subsequent novels by P.D. James, 1962-2008
Profile: Another poet, Adam Dalgliesh is a Detective Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard. He’s kind of based on Mr. Darcy (P.D. James did love Jane Austen, after all), but he’s not that much of an asshole. To follow another trope, he lost his beloved wife in childbirth thirteen years before his appearance in the novel, and has not had the courage to love again since. He’s deep. It explains why he’s a poet.
Detective skills: 5/5
Writing skills: 3/5
5. Kate Fansler
Appearance: In the Last Analysis and other novels, by Carolyn Gold Heilbrun writing as Amanda Cross, 1965-2002
Profile: Kate Fansler is an English professor who finds her life rather disrupted when a colleague is murdered in her therapist’s office. (All academics are in therapy, so this hits closer to home than if the murder had taken place in the department office conference room.) But Kate feels extremely guilty, because she had recommended the therapist to her friend in the first place (the nightmare grows worse), and embarks on an investigation to clear his name. She’s a very good detective, and is probably a great writer because she has tenure (plus, she got it as a woman in the 1960s, so she’s probably Nobel-worthy). These novels also were written by a real-life academic, the Columbia English professor Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, who was the first woman to get tenure in that department. A later novel, Death in a Tenured Position, explores the treatment of women in the academy. O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN.
Detective skills: 4/5
Writing skills: 5/5
4. Mina Murray-Harker
Appearance: Dracula, 1897 [novel]
Profile: I will die on this hill: Dracula is a mystery novel, and Mina Harker is its detective. What can’t she do? What doesn’t she do? She reads, transcribes, and assembles every scrap of evidence she vampire hunters collect. When Dracula tries to escape London, Mina builds a complicated schematic that allows her to figure out which way he is going. She researches every possible route Dracula can take to head back to Transylvania, analyzing maps, schedules, and other materials and she has intuited the only escape route Dracula may have, out of England. And she’s right, dammit! She brings a travel-sized typewriter with them as they travel to the Carpathians to head off the vampire, so she can keep taking notes. She is the only one who can get information out of Dr. Seward’s crazed patient, the one who is expecting his “Master” to arrive. She does everything. Case closed.
Detective skills: 5/5
Writing skills: 4/5
3. Ellery Queen
Appearance: Ellery Queen, short stories and novels by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, 1929-1971
Profile: This a complicated one, because who IS Ellery Queen? A pseudonym created by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, who wrote the first story for a contest in McClure’s in 1928, Ellery Queen was a detective character who wrote about his adventures (in short stories and novels published for decades). He was also the “founder” of a detective magazine, which still operates today. In the early novels, Queen is written as a stuck-up, Harvard-educated rich New York society scion—partially inspired by Philo Vance; as the novels went on, he became a slightly more approachable character, who genuinely cares about helping people. And by the time Jim Hutton played him on NBC from 1975-1976, he was downright adorable.
Detective skills: 5/5
Writing skills: 4/5
2. Harriet Vane
Appearance: Strong Poison and other Peter Wimsey novels by Dorothy L. Sayers, 1930-1939
Profile: Oxford graduate and orphan Harriet Vane is a best-selling writer of detective novels and a noted member of the Bloomsbury group. She’s also on trial, accused of poisoning her ex-boyfriend, with whom she shared an apartment and refused to marry before ending the relationship. She has been writing a murder about arsenic poisoning, and that’s the method by which her ex dies, so it’s up to Peter Wimsey to help expose who really killed him. As the series continues, Wimsey and Vane’s relationship evolves accordingly—at first Wimsey keeps proposing to her (with Harriet refusing); later on, the two begin to solve crimes together, with Harriet taking center stage in Sayers’s best mystery, Gaudy Night. The only reason she’s not #1 is because she keeps needing Wimsey to help solve crimes.You can do it on your own, Harriet! You can! You’re amazing!
Detective skills: 4/5
Writing skills: 5/5
1. Jessica Fletcher
Appearance: Murder, She Wrote, 1984-1996 [televison] (you can read the novels in real life!)
Profile: There have been 274 murders in the small town of Cabot Cove, Maine—despite its population of about 3500, which means it has a murder rate 50% higher than Honduras (reports the Daily Mail). And mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher has solved them all. That’s all there is to say.
Detective skills: 5/5
Writing skills: 5/5
