📚 Detective & Mystery

30 works · ordered by editions in print

The crime and its solution: the puzzle, the hard-boiled reply to the puzzle, and the detectives who keep returning.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject detective and mystery stories in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Title	Author	First published	Editions
A Study in Scarlet	Arthur Conan Doyle	1887	1,447
The Valley of Fear	Arthur Conan Doyle	1914	758
The Murders in the Rue Morgue	Edgar Allan Poe	1841	532
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd	Agatha Christie	1926	221
Poirot investigates	Agatha Christie	1924	216
The Old Man in the Corner	Emma Orczy	1908	215
The Bat	Mary Roberts Rinehart	1926	195
The Technique of the Mystery Story	Carolyn Wells	1913	182
L'affaire Lerouge	Émile Gaboriau	1800	148
The golden slipper and other problems for Violet Strange	Anna Katharine Green	1915	87
The Red House Mystery	A. A. Milne	1922	71
The Cask of Amontillado	Edgar Allan Poe	1846	67
1st to Die	James Patterson	2001	67
Killing Floor	Lee Child	1997	64
The Big Bad Wolf	James Patterson	2001	56
The Hidden Staircase	Leslie McFarlane	1930	43
The Secret of the Old Clock	Leslie McFarlane	1930	41
The lock and key library	Thomas De Quincey	1909	39
Bloodline.	Sidney Sheldon	1977	37
Glory in Death	Nora Roberts	1995	34
The case of the velvet claws	Erle Stanley Gardner	1933	30
The Mask of the Enchantress	Eleanor Burford	1980	30
Psychology	Carole Wade	1987	29
The Mystery of the Green Ghost	Robert Arthur	1965	26
Encyclopedia Brown Solves Them All	Donald J. Sobol	1968	24
The Secret of Terror Castle	Robert Arthur	1964	23
The Mystery of the Coughing Dragon	Kin Platt	1970	20
Everville	Clive Barker	1994	17
Before the fact	Anthony Berkeley	1932	16
Like a Charm	Karin Slaughter	2003	15

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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