Most older books need a little patience from you before they get good. But with the attention span and memory of goldfish we have these days, it is hard to stick to it. In order to get the full feel of a mystery novel, you have to patiently wait to be surprised at the end. A mystery lives or dies on whether it can still shock you, and a hundred-year-old surprise runs a real risk of landing flat.
That’s exactly why the five books on this list are worth taking seriously. None of themask for your patience. They still work the way they were built to on the day they came out. A good mystery doesn’t age like a history lesson you have to sit through out of respect — it ages like something built well enough the first time that nobody’s ever needed to go back and fix it.
1
‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ (1955)
Image via Coward-McCann
Patricia Highsmith wrote a murder mystery where the reader roots for the murderer the entire time, and nearly 70 years later, that trick still works better than it has any right to. Tom Ripley kills his way into a rich man’s identity, and Highsmith never punishes him for it. He gets away clean, without any arrest or guilty conscience that keeps him up at night, and the book ends right there. A lot of modern editors would still get nervous about that conclusion.
Highsmith builds an unfathomable amount of sympathy for Ripley before he does anything unforgivable. You understand exactly why a broke, lonely nobody would want to become someone rich and adored, and by the time he acts on that want, you’re too invested in him to root against it. Writing a sociopath as someone you actually like is a much harder trick than most mystery writers ever attempt, but this book does it, and beautifully so.
2
‘The Big Sleep’ (1939)
Image via Penguin
Raymond Chandler once got asked, during the film adaptation of this book, who actually killed the chauffeur. He said he didn’t know. That’s not a knock against the novel — it’s basically the whole point of it. The plot barely holds together if you try to map it out on paper, and readers have been arguing over its loose threads for 80 years.
None of that matters once you actually start reading it, because Chandler wasn’t really writing a puzzle. He was, in fact, writing Philip Marlowe’s voice as tired, funny, and disgusted with the rich people paying him. That voice is still the blueprint every hard-boiled detective since has been copying.
Collider Exclusive · Action Hero Quiz Which Action Hero Would Be Your Perfect Partner? Rambo · James Bond · Indiana Jones · John McClane · Ethan Hunt
Five legends. Five completely different ways of getting out alive — with style, with muscle, with charm, with luck, or with a plan so intricate it probably shouldn’t work. Ten questions will reveal which action hero was built to have your back.
🎖️Rambo
🍸James Bond
🏺Indiana Jones
🔧John McClane
🎭Ethan Hunt
01
You’re dropped into a dangerous situation with no warning. What do you need most from a partner? The first few seconds tell you everything about who belongs beside you.
02
You have to get somewhere dangerous, fast. How do you travel? How you get there is half the mission.
03
You’re pinned down and outnumbered. What does your ideal partner do? This is when you find out what someone is really made of.
04
The mission is paused. You have one evening to decompress. What does your partner suggest? Who someone is when the pressure drops is who they actually are.
05
How do you prefer your partner to communicate mid-mission? Good communication is the difference between partners and a liability.
06
Your enemy is powerful, well-resourced, and has the upper hand. How should your partner approach them? The approach to the enemy defines the partnership.
07
Things go badly wrong and you’re captured. What do you trust your partner to do? Who someone is when you need them most is the only thing that matters.
08
What does your ideal partner bring to the table that you couldn’t replace? A great partner fills the gap you didn’t know you had.
09
Every partnership has a cost. Which of these can you live with? No one comes without baggage. The question is whether you can carry it together.
10
It’s the final moment. Everything is on the line. What do you need from your partner right now? The last question is the most honest one.
Your Partner Has Been Assigned Your Perfect Partner Is…
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Rambo
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
James Bond
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Indiana Jones
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
John McClane
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Ethan Hunt
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
3
‘Rebecca’ (1938)
A grayscale photo of concrete stairs with the logo for Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.Image via William Morrow Paperbacks, 2006
The narrator of this book never gets a first name — not once, in over 400 pages — and Daphne du Maurier does that on purpose. She marries a wealthy widower and moves into his estate, only to find his dead first wife, Rebecca, still running the place from beyond the grave, through the furniture, the staff, and especially the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, who never lets the new wife forget she’s a replacement.
It’s a mystery novel that’s really about being erased by a woman you’ve never met, and it reads like something written decades after psychological thrillers became their own genre, not decades before. Mrs. Danvers alone would make this book worth reading, a woman so devoted to a corpse that she’d rather burn the whole house down than let anyone move on from her.
4
‘And Then There Were None’ (1939)
Image via Collins Crime Club
Ten strangers get invited to an island by a host none of them can find, and they start dying one by one, in the exact order of an old nursery rhyme nailed to the wall. Agatha Christie removes the detective from her own detective novel completely. No outside investigator is coming to solve it — there are just 10 suspects slowly realizing one of them has to be the killer, because nobody else is left.
This is the best-selling mystery novel ever written, with over 100 million copies sold, and it’s not hard to see why once you notice how many later stories just copied its structure outright. Every horror movie where strangers get picked off one at a time in a locked location owes something to this book. Not everything about the 1939 masterpiece has aged well, as the original title used a racial slur, but it was thankfully retired decades ago, and the mystery underneath it is exactly as airtight as it always was.
5
‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ (1926)
Image via William Collins, Sons
Agatha Christie broke an unwritten rule of mystery with this one. It was so controversial that critics at the time accused her of cheating, and 100 years later, it’s still the twist every other mystery writer gets measured against. The narrator, Dr. Sheppard, tells the whole story in first person, walking you through every clue right alongside the detective.
Then, in the last chapter, it turns out he’s the murderer, and he’s been quietly leaving out the one detail that would have given himself away the entire time. Some readers back then felt tricked instead of impressed, but the British Crime Writers’ Association voted it the best crime novel ever written in 2013, which tells you how that argument eventually turned out. Christie proved a mystery could lie to you honestly, using nothing but what it chose not to say. Nobody’s pulled that off quite as cleanly since.
