Oh, the chutzpah of these guys! Attempting to conceive a list of the thirty-nine best Golden Age Mysteries of all time!! That may explain why we want to enlist all of you as accomplices!!

Curious? Read on . . .

When my mystery-loving brothers Sergio Angelini, Nick Cardillo and I first got together to mimic the dudes over at Screen Drafts, one of our favorite podcasts, and create a draft of the Twenty Best Alfred Hitchcock Films, the internet blew up like one of those test tubes in the chemistry set you had when you were eight! Okay, it didn’t actually blow up . . . in fact, it turned to caramel and ruined the test tube! The silence was truly deafening.

Undaunted, we gathered together again and made our list of the Twenty Best Agatha Christie Novels, thus raising that lady author from utter obscurity!! (People actually seemed to enjoy that one! Thank you, Christie fans!) Flush with success and the fame that surrounds it, Nick, Sergio and I donned our deerstalkers and created a Super Draft by putting in order from worst to best all fourteen Sherlock Holmes movies featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. By then, the need for acclaim had passed – we were having too much fun.

And so, these three little soldiers, er, soldier on. This time, we’re going to tackle the biggest subject yet: the entire Golden Age of Detection library!!! On May 4^th, Nick, Sergio and I are going to draft a list of the Thirty-Nine Best Classic Mysteries of All Time! How did we come up with that number? Contrary to what you may think, it has nothing to do with John Buchan’s classic novel of espionage, The Thirty-Nine Steps, which was written in 1915 and therefore doesn’t qualify for this list. No, it’s all about the categories, which I will explain below.

I think I speak for the three of us of my hope that the end result will be informative to those who are just finding their way through this massive body of crime literature and that the more savvy among you will sigh in agreement with our choices . . . or, alternately, gnash your teeth in angry frustration over how we could have gotten it soooo wrong.

It’s the internet, folks: any reaction is good!

And, because this draft is such a monster, we’d like to invite you to put your own two cents in! Here is an explanation of how the draft works and how you can get involved in the process:

1. We are going to draft a list of thirty-nine mysteries from the Golden Age of Detection. For our list, we are looking only at titles that were published between the years 1920 and 1950. I lay no claim for this being the most accurate or the only span worth considering when we talk about the Golden Age, but when we three talk about it for this draft, those are the years we will be considering. And believe me when I say that this wasn’t as easy as it sounds, since some of my favorite novels from some of my favorite Golden Age authors turn out to have been written in the 1950’s!!
2. For this draft, we’re borrowing our process from another film-centered podcast called The Big Picture. This required us to come up with categories of books within the genre. The list of potential categories is virtually endless, so we decided to limit our list to thirteen categories; this, we feel, is the perfect number for a mystery-centered list. Here are the categories we have chosen:
3. Best Hard-boiled/Private Eye Mystery
4. Best Mystery Featuring an Eccentric Sleuth
5. Best Mystery Solved by a Pollceman/Police Procedural
6. Best Locked Room Mystery
7. Best Final Twist
8. Best Mystery by a Queen of Crime
9. Best Village Mystery
10. Best Wartime Mystery
11. Best Serial Killer Mystery
12. Best Big House Mystery (not a prison but a big town or country home!)
13. Best Comic Mystery
14. Best Mystery Featuring a “Watson”
15. Best Wild Card (something unusual)
16. Each drafter is entitled to place one title in each category. The result is three titles per category. (3 X 13 = 39 – mystery solved!!!) The order of who drafts first, second or third will be determined by random selection, and then will follow this order:

Mr. A chooses first.

Mr. B chooses second.

Mr. C chooses third and fourth.

Then we go back to B for the fifth choice.

Then A chooses sixth and seventh.

And so on until all thirty-nine slots are filled.

• When a drafter takes his turn, he picks a category that he has not entered a novel in yet and plays his title. Whatever author he names cannot be named in that category again! For example, if he places a title by John Dickson Carr in the “Locked Room” category, neither of the other titles in that category may come from Carr (or from his alter ego, Carter Dickson!)
• Authors may appear in more than one category (if the title is applicable), but no title may appear more than once on the list.
• The game continues until every slot has been filled and we have our final list!

And that’s how it works. We will be holding our draft on Saturday, May 4, and it’ll take me a few days to post the results. (I’m shooting for publication one month from today, on Tuesday, May 8.)

And here’s where you come in, readers! You have until the 4^th of May to try and influence us. Feel free to post suggestions in the comments below. But remember there are three of us here drafting this list! We are all on social media and all have varied tastes. We welcome you reaching out to us to promote any title you like – as long as it fits within the parameters I’ve laid out above. I’m posting this in the Golden Age of Detection page of Facebook and on my Twitter page. Sergio and Nick hang out in both places. On Twitter you can find us as follows:

• Brad: @ahsweetmystery
• Sergio: @angelini_sergio
• Nick: @NcardilloNick

I have no idea where we are headed with this, but the truth is clear: with your suggestions, you can help steer us in the right/wrong/controversial direction! Whatever happens, it’s gonna be epic!