(You knew this was coming, right?)
Rather like the recent poll about Science Fiction writers, there will eventually be a run-off poll and then a best of five.
In the meantime, please post your nominations here in this thread, and share your criteria for deciding who is the greatest, if you wish.
I’d like to start things off by dropping Dorothy Sayers’ name into the hat, based on the puzzle of her mysteries, the strength of her writing and her characters.
What do the rest of you think?
Agatha Christie.
/end thread
Hard to top Agatha, but I’ll add Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett.
I imagine Agatha Christie will make a strong showing - I just can’t warm to her writing. I could quite happily pare her writing down to 5 books and really not feel the loss of all the others. In fact, I’m certain we gave away everything of hers the last time we moved. I can’t imagine re-reading anything of hers.
Sayers, on the other hand, got kept and gets re-read often.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Alexander McCall Smith
P.D. James
Tony Hillerman
Elizabeth George
Wilkie Collins
Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine
I always found Agatha Christie kind of overrated. It seemed like her MO was to think of the most ridiculous ending/killer and go with it.
I’ll second P.D. James and Ruth Rendell. Ruth Rendell was actually the first who came to mind for me. Very dark, sinister, and fun.
Not only did Agatha Christie create two of the most interesting and unusual detectives in Poirot and Miss Marple, but the variations where the murderer is revealed to be the narrator, multiple people, the most obvious, the least obvious, etc. raise her stories above the rest.
Elizabeth George is a current favorite of mine and I admit to the guilty pleasure of reading Dick Francis (even though all his characters are essentially the same).
For sheer reading pleasure, no one tops Dorothy L. Sayers. I’ve been rereading the Wimsey books for more than fifty years, and they still have much to offer.
My personal favorites are Dorothy Sayers, MM Kaye, and Dick Francis.
I’ve always liked the sharp, witty character of Archie Goodwin in the Rex Stout novels, but I think I’ll go with Richard Parker for the win. His Spenser novels reinvigorated the tough-guy detective by making him a total wiseass who could back up his wiseassery with bullets or fists, as needed. Also, I liked the fact that Spenser actually worked out. I always wondered how Archie got so tough from walking several blocks every couple of days. I mean, Archie was fit compared to Nero Wolfe but … so what?
Richard Parker then, with Rex Stout trailing by a bit.
Ed Mcbain
Dashiel Hammett
Ruth Rendell
Dorothy Sayers
Agatha Christie
Kind of hard to weed it down as I’m sitting in my office surrounded by nearly 4000 mystery books.
I’m not a huge fan of mysteries, but based on the stories I’ve read I’ll go with Dorothy Sayers, with honorable mention to Fredric Brown.
Arthur Conan Doyle hands down
Agatha Christie has no dynamic or actual mystery about it the character who was least likely to have anything to do with it did it. Holmes could out-deduce both Marple and Poirot with one hand behind his back even on his most tweaked out crack binge.
Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene 
Wilkie Collins
Josephine Tey
Dashiell Hammett
Georges Simenon
Graham Greene
Raymond Chandler
James M. Cain
Donald E Westlake
Elmore Leonard
John le Carré
Tony Hillerman
Most of my favorites are listed, except Stephen J. Cannell.
Really? I love Sherlock Holmes, but as I’ve been reading it as an adult I’ve come to realise that he depends quite heavily on confessions from suspects, and bizarre coincidences just as much as pure deduction. None of this detracts from the pleasure I get from reading the Holmes stories, but I don’t think they are actually that well written.
My nominations would be:
Ruth Rendell
Ellis Peters
Ngaio Marsh (I can’t believe I’m the first person to suggest her)
Colin Dexter
PD James
Dorothy L Sayers
Richard Parker is a poster here. He"ll be glad to know you’ve nominated him.
You mean Robert B. Parker.
No one listed ANY of mine yet?!
John Dickson Carr (top of my list… I think. Hmmm.)
Ellery Queen (by whom I mean Dannay and Lee, not any of the other guys who wrote with this name)
Christianna Brand
I’d love to nominate Ed Hoch, but he’s a little modern. I’m willing to let him “stew” for a while.
To all intents and purposes, Arthur Conan Doyle invented the genre (although foreshadowed, in some respects, by Wilkie Collins). Everyone since Doyle has just been working variations on his themes. Some of the more recent writers can create more rounded characters (Tony Hillerman and P.D. James, for example, but certainly not Agatha Christie, whose fame comes largely just from the sheer volume of her production), but in respect of the creation of mysteries, fascinating puzzles to be solved by the application of reason, Doyle has not been surpassed, only well (or, more often, badly) imitated.