Other top detective novels

These things just keep popping up in my head.

I don't know how I was able to forget Arthur Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles. It's still an interesting read, even though I'm not a fan of whodunnits. There's a strong atmosphere of grand adventure in the Holmes stories. In this, Doyle comes close to actual horror writing - in which he was quite apt.

James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss (translated in Finnish as Viimeinen kunnon suudelma). I've read this only once - on a trip I made with two friends of mine to Nordkapp, the northernest town in Europe. We had an old Beetle for a car and it took us four or five days. We slept in a tent at roadsides - I remember once putting the tent up almost in someone's backyard, because we couldn't see almost anything in the night! We almost hit a reindeer somewhere in the northern Norwegian, but I saw the car's lights' reflection on the animal's eyes and yelled "stop!" just in time.

I liked the book very much, but couldn't care for Crumley's The Mexican Tree Duck. Didn't even try the other translated novels.

Charles Willeford's Sideswipe, with Hoke Moseley. The book convinced me that Willeford is a genius. I'd had some trouble with some of his novels, but not anymore. I also like Willeford's early novel Wild Wives, which is a PI story. It's quite crude, but very exhilarating. I so hope that a Finnish paperback publisher would've grabbed this in the early sixties - or any other Willeford paperback. No such luck.