I really liked the early Saint stuff and it became subpar relatively quickly IMO. There is a 60s Saint take-off involving a character called Modesty Blaise, who is actually like a cross between the Saint and James Bond, with a soupcon of Matt Helm for spice. I only read a few, really hard to get a hold of, but really enjoyed the ones I found.
Seemed to me like the Saint books were very repetitive. Another author my parents loved, but just didn’t do it for me, was Georges Simenon.
I don’t know if they’re obscure, but I liked all the Francis Xavier Flynn books by Gregory McDonald, who’s MUCH better known for creating reporter Irwin “Fletch” Fletcher.
Especially*** Flynn’s Inn ***and The Buck Passes Flynn.
My favourite mystery series is the Asey May books (24 books, 1931-1951) by Phoebe Atwood Taylor. (The two books listed here as “omnibus editions” are actually novella collections.)
Mario Acevdo’s series with Felix Gomez, A war vet now private detective who was bitten by a vampire in Iraq.
Charles Stross - The Laundry Files.
Oh, sure. That’s a disease for almost all long series, but some are far worse than others. When I worked at a library in high school, they had, for some bizarre reason, a whole shelf of Perry Mason paperbacks. I read 40 of them in a row and then never opened another for 50 years.
My wife is a huge Modesty Blaise fan. She was a comic strip creation of Peter O’Donnell that became a sensation in Europe, and he added on a series of novels that are well regarded.
Nitpick: Asey Mayo. Same advice I would give for most of these series, including The Saint. Don’t read the earliest books first. Start five years or so in when the character became mature and then only go back if you’re a completist. Heck, Charteris tried to pretend that the first Saint book never existed.
Taylor had a secondary series about Leonidus Witherall. (Originally under the name Alice Tilton by all republished as by Taylor.) Wonderful farce. She was as good with set-ups in that series as William Marshall, and that’s high praise.
Edgar award winning author Stuart Kaminsky taught film at North Western. Sara Paretsky’s first novel is dedicated to Kaminsky who was her tutor. He wrote over 70 books including several on film. He had three vastly entertaining series the Toby Peters series set mostly in old Hollywood. Each book featured famous figures from the period. His Inspector Rostnikov series is about a Moscow detective hated by the KGB because his wife is Jewish. The Abe Lieberman series is about a Jewish Chicago detective with a Catholic partner. All are excellent but no-one I know has ever heard of him until I recommend his books…
More like pulp series: The Executioner, The Penetrator, and The Death Merchant.
I don’t read a lot of “seamy, violent, perverse”, but there are a few writers I like - such as Charlie Huston, who writes such fantastic dialog. I like hard-boiled tempered with a little humor, even if it’s dark humor.
John Burdett’s crime/mystery series starting with Bangkok 8, set in largely in the red light district of Bangkok.
Christopher Brookmyre’s “tartan noir” crime novels are darkly funny. They’re very, very Scottish. I started with Quite Ugly One Morning.
Perhaps it is of local interest only, but I enjoy theEarle Emerson Thomas Black and Mac Fontana series. Black is a Seattle based ex-policeman and PI and Mac Fontana is an ex-firefighter and arson investigator.
Emerson is a retired Seattle firefighter. All his stories are set in the NW.
His Toby Peters books are also among my favorites: the others, not as much.
Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko series, set in Russia.
Not all that obscure, but I loved the Harlem Detective series by Chester Himes.
There were maybe eight or nine novels set in the Harlem of the 1950s and 60s. The books feature two NYPD detectives, Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones.
They’re as good as anything by Thompson or Chandler. Well worth a read. I think they’re still in print.
So you’re the one who recommended that! It started with a turd on a mantel. I don’t recall if Chekhov’s rule applied or not. (I really liked that book but haven’t read any of the others yet.)
Soul Brother Number Two, if you think you’d like a hard-boiled woman, read some of Denise Mina’s books.
He just released his newest this month, The Marriage Tree.
Possibly even better is John Burdett and his Bangkok 8 series (as mentioned above by Eleanor of Aquitane), although the first in the series is still the best of the bunch. Although I would correct Eleanor by saying they’re set in the red-light districts, plural. We have quite a few dotted around, not just one.
I, who read few mysteries, have actually read one of those, set in a science fiction convention of all things.
Ron Goulart had a series with Groucho Marx as a detective.
I think the Richard Castle books, supposedly written by the guy in the series by perhaps written by Tom Straw are dumb fun, just like what you’d think he’d write. Seeing the connection between events in the book and the show is fun also.
And while I don’t read many mysteries, I’ve read all the Brunetti books set in Venice and the Inspector Otani books set in Japan.
Yep, The Marriage Tree is on my to-read list. I’ve read Bangkok 8, I’ll have to find more by Burdett.
Any Donald E Westlake fans? He wrote a ton of pulp fiction crime novels under a number of pseudonyms. As Richard Stark he wrote the Parker series, probably my favorite.
Tanya Huff’s Vicky Nelson novels (a Toronto PI partnered with a vampire).
Hmm, I thought I got the recommendation from you. That first book is his first novel, and they do get better. There are five that feature that same character, journalist Jack Parlabane, and there’s some benefit to reading them in order.
The biggest problem with Brookmyre is that he rants. If you happen to wholeheartedly agree with the rant then it can be entertaining, but if you disagree, or if you don’t know what the hell he’s talking about (e.g. Scottish politics) then it can get annoying. But the books are worth putting up with it.
I haven’t yet read his newest couple of books yet, but supposedly they are more serious creepy crime novels without the humor.
I have to mention Toni L. P. Kelner’s series about Laura Fleming, a transplanted Southerner who solves crimes in Boston (not unlike her Southern Transplant author, who lives a couple of towns over from me north of Boston). She published eight of these before moving on to other series.
Then she went on to the Tilda Harper “Where Are They Now” mysteries, following a writer who looks up former stars and hits. She published three of these: