I don’t recall the McGurk Organization ever having to solve a murder.
Assuming that you define murder as a deliberate act committed by one or more human beings, then The Murders In The Rue Morgue has no murders.
I think you’re misremembering. Not only are there many murders, often disguised badly as accidents, but it’s de rigeur for the hero to get pretty roughed up with graphic and uh, lovingly written, violence along the way. The hero usually also has to deal with either death threats or actual attempted murder of himself.
Those are the Nick Velvet stories, by Edward D. Hoch. There may be an incidental murder in some of them, but as short stories they only need a central mystery to be solved.
And yes, most novels not only do have a murder in them, but absolutely must. Neither editors nor readers will accept them otherwise. I know I’ve read a few novels in which the “murder” turns out to be suicide or accident, none coming to mind right now, but almost everybody feels this is unfulfilling, maybe why they don’t rise to memorable status.
It’s a while since I’ve read it, but isn’t that the solution in …
[spoiler]Squeeze Play, the debut novel by Paul Auster, writing as Paul Benjamin. Since republished in Hand to Mouth.
It’s also the solution in Martin Amis’s Night Train.[/spoiler]
I’ve loved some of both writers’ other work, but, even as someone who’s not a great mystery reader, both books just seemed too, well, lazy. (Thought the first author disowns his.) In that sort of story it’s too obvious a twist and hence a cop-out.
The nine Taylors, Dorothy Sayers (accident)
It was a set book in my O-level Eng Lit, along with Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown.
Those books were all about smugglers, except The Smugglers of Pirate’s Cove, which was about pirates.
This doesn’t quite qualify, but Robert B. Parker’s best Spenser novel, Looking For Rachel Wallace, is about a kidnapping, not a murder, and no one dies until the climatic shootout at the very end. The plot is mostly about Spenser realizing that he’s a dick.
I’m not sure you’re right about Sayers’ The Nine Tailors:
As I remember it, the killer didn’t deliberately set out to murder his victim, but he did kidnap the fellow and imprison him in a bell tower, accidentally causing his death. That seems to qualify as felony murder to me.
If The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time counts as great detective fiction (and since Encyclopedia Brown makes it, this should too) then it should be included in the list. A dog dies, but no people.
Yes, that’s the plot as I remember it. Certainly it wasn’t a murder in the traditional mystery novel sense, where a callous killer willfully plots a death for an evil motive. In this case is simply trying to protect his marriage, kills by accident without any particular malice, and doesn’t even realise he caused the death.
I’ll leave it to the lawyers to argue the legality of it. I’m still not sure it would count as murder. Manslaughter, possibly.
Originally Posted by lonesome loser
The Hardy Boys
That & Scooby-Doo.
Hmmm…I wonder why smugglers, people who typically move drugs & guns, are more acceptable for kid lit/vid than regular thieves & killers? 
Milhouse Van Houten: You want to read my Hardy Boys book? It’s about smugglers!
Bart Simpson: They’re **all ** about smugglers.
A minor correction:As I remember it, the killer didn’t intend to leave his victim in the tower as long as he did, but was prevented from getting to the tower, I think by the same floods which brought Lord Peter Wimsey to the scene.
CJ
Former change ringer and Lord Peter Wimsey fan
IIRC : he was struck ill, he was feverish and delirious, and his babbling “must get to church” was picked up by the parrot.
Since the OP asked about fiction, and not novels, I’m going to go ahead and mention The Big Lebowski. No murders, but…
…there is one death due to natural causes, and a consensual de-toeing of one of the “villains.”
One example is Sherlock Holmes’s case in
“The Problem of Thor Bridge,” in which a woman kills herself under circumstances that make it look like a murder, in order to frame the younger woman with whom her husband has fallen in love. A later Conan Doyle story but a good 'un.
It’s too bad this is about stories that don’t involve killing, since that would make a joke about thread necromancy easier…
At least one of the Lord Darcy stories ( but not the novel ) had no murder; in that case, the mystery was the location of an important treaty being held by the deceased.
Well, the poison was non-fatal… but there was a murder in that one.
Arthur Tingley is bonked on the head with a paperweight.
Edited to add: bloody hell, I didn’t see the original date of this thread! Elendil’s Heir, what led you to raise this zombie?
I haven’t read too many of Leslie Charteris’s “The Saint” novels, but my understanding is that they mostly center on thievery and confidence games with only occasional murders. More “gentlemanly” crimes most of the time.