Chiefscott,
I remember the Three detectives rather well, read mst of them in gradeschool. I remember that towards the end of the series (As far as I know) someone else started to introduce the books after Hitchcock died.
Geeeez…20 posts and nobody mentioned Sam Spade, the archetypal gumshoe. Or Nick Charles who not only got the bad guy but got to boff Myrna Loy.
There’s only two kinda mystery writers…Hammett…and hacks. 
JB
The Stuff that dreams are made of.
Spenser and Kinsey Millhone
They’re my favorites, not necessarily the best. Best would probably Hercule Poirot.
Interesting that no one has mentioned Auguste Dupin.
You’re all wrong. The greatest fictional investigator of all time is the one and only John Shaft.
Shaft? Pah! A pale imitation (ouch) of Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, the protagonists of Chester Himes’s spirited novels. Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), for example.
I’d like to second a lot of the people who were mentioned. I would like to add a few more. Under the guilty pleasure category I would add Stephanie Plum from the Janet Evanovich . They are LMAO funny. Elvis Cole by Robert Crais and John Francis Cuddy By Jeremiah Healy. Both of these tend towards the hard boiled end of the detective spectrum. The Elvis Cole books have a good dose of smart aleck humour in them.
Keith
You want contemporary hard-boiled? Loren D. Estleman’s Amos Walker could kick Jeremiah Healy’s John Francis Cuddy’s ass.
Walker works Detroit, where they KNOW from hard-boiled. Cuddy’s too busy going to listen to the Boston Symphony and lifing his pinky at High Tea up in the Back Bay.
I can’t believe it. No one’s mentioned one of my favorites –
Judge Jen-Djieh Dee, from Robert van Gulik’s series about the Tan dynasty judge/civil administrator/detective.
A couple of years ago someone wrote a new book about Dee. It was called “Dynasty”, but I can’t recall the author. His vision of Dee – who really existed, by the way – was not the same as van Gulik’s, but he kept him a detective.
Sorry – messed that up. The new Dee novel is “Deception” by Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri. Interesting, but not as good as the von Gulik books. For von Gulik fans I’d also recommend his non-Dee “The Given Day” and JanWillem van de Weterings “Robert van Gulik”.
I also love the mysteries of Fredric Brown. His team was Ed and Am Hunter, first introduced in “The Fabulous Clipjoint”, his Edgar-winning debut novel.
For my other choices Sherlock Holmes, of course. Nero Wolfe. Toni L.P. Kelner’s Laura Fleming.
Oh, Frederic Brown is great! Have you read The Night of the Jabberwock?
It’s worth a search on http://www.Bookfinder.com to get the old Zomba omnibus edition from the early '80s…it’s got Jabberwock, The Screaming Mimi, Knock Three-One-Two and The Fabulous Clipjoint in it…
Wolfe & Archie, no contest. Maybe not the most complex cases, but the byplay between the two makes the rest trivial.
Name another detective who would burn a dictionary page by page because it offended him - and be justified in doing so.
The Fredric Brown omnibus you mention was the first book of his mysteries I ever read, Ukulele Ike. Before I read about “Night of the Jabberwock” in Martion Gardner’s Annotated Alice, I didn’t even know that he wrote mysteries. (I knew of his sf and fantasy, though). Since then I’ve been hunting down his old mysteries. For a while they were reprinting one a year, but they stopped that about ten years ago. I’ve gotten quite a few through used bookshops, but I’m still missing a lot of them. A company in Florida republished a lot of his previously uncollected pulp stories in the latee eighties, but only about half of those were published in paperback. The rest were limited-edition hardcovers that are nigh-impossible to get.
Still, you can find a few old Fredric Browns, and they’re worth it.