The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Detective Novels from the 1950s

The Golden Age of Detective Fiction is generally narrowed to the interwar period, roughly covering the 1920s and '30s, because the World Wars make convenient bookends for the detective story's post-WWI boom period and post-WWII decline – not everyone agrees. Some have argued it started with E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913) or even earlier with G.K. Chesterton's short story collection The Innocence of Father Brown (1911). It also ignores the 1920s was a decade of growing pains as the genre was still putting itself together. And, worse, it dismisses the 1940s. A time when established writers produced some of their best, most mature work and new names appeared on the scene. I have changed my opinions on the start and end of the Golden Age several times over the years. Placing it first somewhere around the early '20s and coming to an abrupt end in 1949, but later included the 1950s. More recently, I have come to see the Golden Age as a life cycle rather than a clearly, or vaguely,…