A good historical mystery gives you two books for the price of one. There is the puzzle, with its body, its suspects and its clever detective. And there is the world around it: a medieval abbey, a Roman back street, Berlin in 1936, a Victorian drawing room.
The best writers in the genre make the two halves depend on each other. The crime could only happen in that time and place, and solving it means understanding how that world really worked. This list picks the twenty novels that do it best, most of them the first book in a series, so you always know where to go next.
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What Counts as a Historical Mystery?
For this list, a historical mystery is a crime novel set well before the time it was written, built on research rather than memory. A detective story written in 1890 about 1890 is a period piece now, but it was contemporary fiction then. Sherlock Holmes, for that reason, is not on this list.
The detective can be a professional or an amateur: a monk, a lawyer, a Roman informer, a nurse, a magistrate. What matters is that the investigation drives the plot and the history is more than wallpaper.
The Crime Writers’ Association uses a similar rule for its Historical Dagger, which goes to the best crime novel set at least fifty years in the past. Two winners of that prize appear below.
Quick Picks
| If you want… | Read this |
|---|---|
| The classic of the genre | The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco |
| A gentle medieval mystery | A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters |
| Tudor politics and murder | Dissolution by C.J. Sansom |
| Ancient Rome with jokes | The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis |
| Dark noir in Nazi Berlin | March Violets by Philip Kerr |
| A serial killer thriller | The Alienist by Caleb Carr |
| A clever woman detective | Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear |
The 20 Best Historical Mystery Novels
1. The Name of the Rose (1980)
Author: Umberto Eco Setting: A Benedictine abbey in northern Italy, 1327
The Franciscan friar William of Baskerville arrives at a wealthy abbey with his young novice, Adso of Melk, to take part in a religious debate. Instead he finds monks dying in strange ways, and an abbot who wants the matter solved before the papal delegation arrives.
At the centre of the abbey is its library, a locked labyrinth that only the librarian may enter. William, a medieval Sherlock Holmes with a pair of new reading glasses, suspects the answers are inside.
Eco was a professor of semiotics, and the novel is full of theology, philosophy and Latin. It is also a superb whodunit. The 1986 film with Sean Connery (IMDb) brought it to an even wider audience, and it remains the book every other historical mystery is measured against.
2. A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977)
Author: Ellis Peters Setting: Shrewsbury and North Wales, 1137
Brother Cadfael is a Welsh-born monk at Shrewsbury Abbey, a former crusader and sea captain who came late to the cloister and now tends the herb garden. When his ambitious prior leads an expedition into Wales to bring back the bones of Saint Winifred, Cadfael goes along as translator.
The Welsh villagers do not want to give up their saint, and when the leading objector is found dead, Cadfael begins to investigate. He does it with patience, a knowledge of plants and wounds, and a warm understanding of human weakness.
This is the book that created the modern historical mystery series. Nineteen more novels followed, and the television version starred Derek Jacobi (IMDb). The full list is in our Brother Cadfael reading order.
3. Dissolution (2003)
Author: C.J. Sansom Setting: A monastery on the south coast of England, 1537
Matthew Shardlake is a hunchbacked lawyer and a true believer in religious reform. When a royal commissioner is murdered at the monastery of Scarnsea, Thomas Cromwell sends Shardlake to find the killer and finish the job of closing the house.
Snowed in among frightened monks, Shardlake starts to question the men he works for. Sansom, who trained as a lawyer and held a doctorate in history, makes the politics as gripping as the murder.
Six more Shardlake novels followed, each longer and richer than the last. See our Shardlake series reading order and, for more from the period, our list of the best Tudor historical fiction.
4. The Silver Pigs (1989)
Author: Lindsey Davis Setting: Rome and Britain, AD 70
Marcus Didius Falco is a private informer in the Rome of the emperor Vespasian: broke, sarcastic, and living in a sixth-floor apartment he can barely afford. When he rescues a senator’s niece in the Forum, he stumbles into a conspiracy involving silver ingots stolen from the mines of Britain.
Davis took the hard-boiled private eye and dropped him into ancient Rome, and the result is one of the funniest detective voices in fiction. The history underneath the jokes is rock solid.
The series runs to twenty novels, with a spin-off about Falco’s adopted daughter. Start with our Marcus Didius Falco reading order, then move on to the Flavia Albia series.
5. The Alienist (1994)
Author: Caleb Carr Setting: New York City, 1896
Someone is murdering boy prostitutes on the Lower East Side, and the police have no interest in the victims. The new police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, quietly asks his friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler to investigate.
Kreizler is an “alienist”, an early psychologist, and his method is revolutionary for the time: build a picture of the killer’s mind from the evidence he leaves. He is helped by a newspaper reporter, two detective brothers, and Sara Howard, a police secretary with ambitions of her own.
This is the darkest book on the list, and one of the most absorbing. Carr was a military historian, and his Gilded Age New York is extraordinarily detailed. A sequel, The Angel of Darkness, followed in 1997.
6. March Violets (1989)
Author: Philip Kerr Setting: Berlin, 1936
Bernie Gunther is a former policeman turned private detective in a city preparing for the Olympic Games. A wealthy industrialist hires him to find a necklace stolen from the safe of his murdered daughter, and the case leads straight into the rivalries of the Nazi leadership.
Kerr writes in the voice of Raymond Chandler, with the wisecracks and the weary honesty, but the corruption his detective faces is of a different order. The tension between Bernie’s decency and the regime he has to survive powers the whole series.
There are fourteen Gunther novels in all. They are covered in our Bernie Gunther reading order and on our Philip Kerr author page.
7. An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997)
Author: Iain Pears Setting: Oxford, 1663
An Oxford fellow is found dead in his rooms, and a young servant woman is accused of his murder. The story is then told four times, by four narrators: a Venetian visitor, a student trying to clear his father’s name, a mathematician and code-breaker, and an archivist.
Each narrator contradicts the last, and each has reasons to lie. Only at the end do you see what really happened. Along the way you meet real figures from the early days of modern science, including Robert Boyle and John Locke.
It is a long, demanding and brilliant book, often described as the closest thing to The Name of the Rose in English. It is a standalone, so there is no series to commit to.
8. Roman Blood (1991)
Author: Steven Saylor Setting: Rome, 80 BC
A young, unknown advocate called Cicero has taken on his first big case, the defence of a man accused of murdering his own father. He hires Gordianus, known as the Finder, to dig up the truth.
The trial was real, and Cicero’s speech survives. Saylor builds a tense mystery around it, set in a Rome still bleeding from the dictatorship of Sulla.
Where Falco is comic, Gordianus is serious and thoughtful, and the series follows him and his family through the fall of the Republic. See our Roma Sub Rosa reading order and our Steven Saylor author page.
9. Mistress of the Art of Death (2007)
Author: Ariana Franklin Setting: Cambridge, 1171
Four children have been murdered in Cambridge, and the townspeople blame the Jews. King Henry II, who needs the taxes his Jewish subjects pay, asks the King of Sicily to send an expert in the causes of death.
The expert who arrives is Adelia Aguilar, a doctor trained at the medical school of Salerno, where women could study. In England she has to hide her skill or risk being called a witch.
Adelia is a wonderful creation, blunt, brilliant and out of place. The novel won the CWA’s historical award in 2007, and three more Adelia novels followed.
10. The Face of a Stranger (1990)
Author: Anne Perry Setting: London, 1856
A man wakes in a London hospital after a carriage accident with no memory of who he is. He is told he is William Monk, a police detective, and he is soon sent back to work on the murder of a Crimean War hero.
Monk has to solve the case while hiding his amnesia and piecing together his own past. What he learns about the man he used to be is not always welcome.
It is one of the best opening ideas in crime fiction, and it begins a series of twenty-four novels. See our William Monk reading order.
11. Maisie Dobbs (2003)
Author: Jacqueline Winspear Setting: London and Kent, 1910 to 1929
In 1929 Maisie Dobbs opens her own office as a “psychologist and investigator”. Her first case looks like a simple matter of a suspicious husband, but it leads her back to the Great War and to the wounded men it left behind.
Maisie began as a housemaid, won a place at Cambridge, and served as a nurse in France. The novel tells her story alongside the case, and the two come together movingly.
The book won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. The series runs to eighteen novels and follows Maisie through to the Second World War. For more from this era, visit our World War I historical fiction hub.
12. A Rising Man (2016)
Author: Abir Mukherjee Setting: Calcutta, 1919
Captain Sam Wyndham, a former Scotland Yard detective and a survivor of the trenches, arrives in Calcutta to join the Imperial Police. Within days a senior British official is found dead, with a note in his mouth warning the British to leave India.
Wyndham works the case with Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee, an Indian officer whose name his British colleagues cannot be bothered to pronounce. Their uneasy partnership is the heart of the series.
Mukherjee shows the Raj from both sides, with wit and anger. The novel won the CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger in 2017.
13. Heresy (2010)
Author: S.J. Parris Setting: Oxford, 1583
Giordano Bruno, an Italian philosopher on the run from the Inquisition, comes to Oxford for a public debate. He is also working for Francis Walsingham, the queen’s spymaster, who wants to know which of the scholars are secret Catholics.
Then the murders begin, each one staged to echo the death of a martyr. Bruno was a real man, and Parris makes him a sharp, likeable outsider.
The book begins a series that takes Bruno across Elizabethan England and Europe. See our Giordano Bruno reading order.
14. Crocodile on the Sandbank (1975)
Author: Elizabeth Peters Setting: Egypt, 1884
Amelia Peabody is a Victorian spinster with an inheritance, a steel-tipped parasol and no patience for fools. She sets off to see Egypt, collects a companion in Rome, and ends up at an archaeological dig that seems to be haunted by a walking mummy.
The author was a trained Egyptologist, writing under a pen name, and the archaeology is accurate. The tone is pure comedy, with Amelia’s supremely confident narration carrying everything.
There are twenty Amelia Peabody books, following her family across decades of real Egyptian discoveries. For readers who want their mysteries light, this is the place to start.
15. The Cater Street Hangman (1979)
Author: Anne Perry Setting: London, 1881
Young women are being strangled in the respectable streets around Cater Street. When the killer strikes close to the Ellison household, Inspector Thomas Pitt comes to ask questions, and the outspoken Charlotte Ellison finds herself drawn to a man far below her social class.
Perry’s great subject is the gap between Victorian appearances and what goes on behind closed doors. This first novel sets the pattern for the series: Pitt has the authority, and Charlotte has the access to drawing rooms he could never enter.
The series runs to thirty-two novels, all in our Charlotte and Thomas Pitt reading order. More on both of Perry’s series is on our Anne Perry author page.
16. What Angels Fear (2005)
Author: C.S. Harris Setting: London, 1811
A young woman is found murdered in a church near Westminster Abbey, and the evidence points to Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, a nobleman recently returned from the Napoleonic Wars. He escapes arrest and sets out to find the real killer himself.
Harris has a doctorate in European history, and her Regency London is a long way from the ballrooms of romance. This is a city of slums, spies and political plots on the eve of the Regency.
The book launched a long-running series, with a new St. Cyr mystery appearing almost every year.
17. Medicus (2006)
Author: Ruth Downie Setting: Roman Britain
Gaius Petreius Ruso is an army doctor, newly divorced, in debt, and posted to the rainy fortress of Deva, the modern city of Chester. He has no wish to investigate anything, but the bodies of young women from a local bar keep turning up, and nobody else seems to care.
Ruso is a reluctant, grumbling detective, and the humour comes from his efforts to live a quiet life. The British slave girl he buys on impulse, Tilla, becomes his partner in the series.
The novel was first published in Britain under a longer title, Medicus and the Disappearing Dancing Girls. Seven more Ruso novels followed.
18. The Chinese Bell Murders (1958)
Author: Robert van Gulik Setting: China under the Tang dynasty, 7th century
Judge Dee was a real magistrate of the Tang dynasty, later celebrated in Chinese detective tales. Robert van Gulik, a Dutch diplomat and scholar of China, brought him to Western readers in a series of his own novels.
In this one, Dee takes up a new post and faces three cases at once, as Chinese detective stories traditionally required. He is judge, detective and prosecutor in one, helped by a small band of loyal lieutenants.
The books are short, clever and unlike anything else in the genre, with the author’s own illustrations in Chinese style. This is a good first Judge Dee.
19. Death Comes as the End (1944)
Author: Agatha Christie Setting: Thebes, Egypt, around 2000 BC
Agatha Christie wrote only one historical novel, and it is one of the earliest full-length historical whodunits. A young widow returns to the house of her father, a mortuary priest, just as he brings home a new young concubine who sets the whole family against each other.
There is no detective and no police, only a household where people begin to die. Christie based the family on real letters from the period, suggested to her by an Egyptologist friend.
It is a pure Christie puzzle in an unusual setting, and proof that the country house mystery works just as well beside the Nile.
20. The King’s Gambit (1990)
Author: John Maddox Roberts Setting: Rome, 70 BC
Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger is a junior official from one of Rome’s great families, responsible for policing a rough district of the city. A murder and a fire on his patch lead him towards some of the most powerful men in the Republic.
This is the first book in the SPQR series, the third great Roman detective series alongside Falco and Gordianus. Decius is an insider, an aristocrat who knows Caesar, Cicero and Pompey personally, and he tells his story as an old man looking back.
It is short, fast and funny, and a good choice if you have finished the other two. For more Roman fiction, see our list of the best Ancient Rome historical fiction.
Honourable Mentions
Absolution by Murder (1994)
Author: Peter Tremayne
Sister Fidelma is an Irish nun and a qualified advocate of the ancient Irish law courts. In her first case she investigates a murder at the Synod of Whitby in AD 664. The author was a scholar of Celtic history, and the series is a window into early medieval Ireland.
A Test of Wills (1996)
Author: Charles Todd
Inspector Ian Rutledge returns to Scotland Yard in 1919, hiding severe shell shock and haunted by the voice of a dead soldier. His first case, the murder of a colonel in a Warwickshire village, could end his career. A fine, sombre companion to Maisie Dobbs.
A Classic That Bends the Rules
The Daughter of Time (1951)
Author: Josephine Tey
This book is set in the 1950s, when it was written, so it is not a historical novel by our definition. It earns a place on the page anyway. Inspector Alan Grant, stuck in a hospital bed, becomes fascinated by a portrait of Richard III and decides to investigate, from his bed, whether the king really murdered the Princes in the Tower.
It is a detective story about how history gets written, and it has sent generations of readers to the Wars of the Roses. In 1990 the Crime Writers’ Association voted it the greatest crime novel of all time.
Historical Mysteries by Era
| Era | Novels |
|---|---|
| Ancient world | Death Comes as the End, Roman Blood, The King’s Gambit, The Silver Pigs, Medicus |
| Early medieval and Tang China | The Chinese Bell Murders, Absolution by Murder |
| Medieval Europe | A Morbid Taste for Bones, Mistress of the Art of Death, The Name of the Rose |
| Tudor and Stuart England | Dissolution, Heresy, An Instance of the Fingerpost |
| Regency and Victorian | What Angels Fear, The Face of a Stranger, The Cater Street Hangman, Crocodile on the Sandbank, The Alienist |
| 20th century | A Rising Man, A Test of Wills, Maisie Dobbs, March Violets |
For more reading by period, explore our hubs for the ancient world, medieval Europe, Tudor England and the Victorian era.
How to Choose a Historical Mystery
Pick the period first. Most readers come to historical mysteries through an era they already love. If you like Rome, start with Falco or Gordianus. If you like the Middle Ages, start with Cadfael. The mystery plot will carry you either way.
Decide between cosy and dark. Cadfael, Amelia Peabody and Maisie Dobbs are gentle, humane books with little on-page violence. The Alienist, March Violets and Mistress of the Art of Death are much grimmer. Both kinds are on this list, so check the entry before you buy.
Standalone or series? Seventeen of the twenty main picks begin a series, which is the great pleasure of the genre: you get to watch a detective age and change over many books. If you want a single, complete experience, choose The Name of the Rose, An Instance of the Fingerpost or Death Comes as the End.
Start with book one. Most of these series can be read in any order, but the first book usually introduces the detective’s history and the people around him. Our reading order pages list every series in full.
Why History and Mystery Work So Well Together
A detective is the perfect guide to an unfamiliar world. He has a reason to go everywhere, from the palace to the slums, and a reason to ask questions about everything. Readers learn how a society works by watching someone investigate it.
The past also removes the modern detective’s shortcuts. There are no fingerprints, no cameras and no laboratories. A monk in 1137 or a lawyer in 1537 has to rely on observation, conversation and reasoning, which is exactly what makes a good puzzle.
Finally, the stakes are different. Justice in these books is often uncertain or dangerous, and the detective may fear the authorities as much as the killer. That gives the best historical mysteries a moral weight that goes beyond the puzzle.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best historical mystery novel?
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is widely regarded as the greatest historical mystery. It is set in an Italian abbey in 1327 and combines a murder investigation with medieval philosophy and theology. For an easier first read, try A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters or Dissolution by C.J. Sansom.
What is a historical mystery?
A historical mystery is a crime or detective novel set in a period well before the time it was written. The author recreates the past through research, and the investigation depends on the customs, laws and knowledge of that era.
What are the best historical mystery series?
Popular series include Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters, Shardlake by C.J. Sansom, Marcus Didius Falco by Lindsey Davis, Bernie Gunther by Philip Kerr, William Monk by Anne Perry, Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear and Amelia Peabody by Elizabeth Peters.
Which historical mysteries are set in ancient Rome?
The three best known Roman detective series are Marcus Didius Falco by Lindsey Davis, Roma Sub Rosa by Steven Saylor and SPQR by John Maddox Roberts. Ruth Downie’s Medicus series is set in Roman Britain.
Are historical mysteries historically accurate?
The best ones are carefully researched. Many authors in the genre are trained historians, lawyers or archaeologists, including C.J. Sansom, Elizabeth Peters and C.S. Harris. The crimes are usually invented, but the settings, laws and daily life are drawn from the record.
Do I need to read historical mystery series in order?
Most series can be read in any order, since each book has its own case. Reading in publication order is still the best approach, because the detective’s personal story develops from book to book.
What are good cosy historical mysteries?
For gentle mysteries with little violence, try the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters, the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters and the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear.
Is Sherlock Holmes historical mystery fiction?
Not strictly. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Holmes stories about his own time, so they were contemporary fiction when published. A historical mystery is written by an author looking back at an earlier period.
Related Content
- Brother Cadfael Reading Order
- Shardlake Series Reading Order
- Marcus Didius Falco Reading Order
- Roma Sub Rosa Reading Order
- Bernie Gunther Reading Order
- William Monk Reading Order
- Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Reading Order
- Giordano Bruno Reading Order
- Ellis Peters: Complete Guide
- C.J. Sansom: Complete Guide
- Lindsey Davis: Complete Guide
- Best Tudor Historical Fiction
- Best Medieval Historical Fiction
- Best Historical Fiction Series
Conclusion
Historical mysteries are the easiest way into almost any period. Pick a century, find its detective, and let the investigation show you around.
If you want the masterpiece, read The Name of the Rose. If you want a series to live in for a year, begin with Cadfael, Shardlake or Falco. And if you finish all twenty, the reading order pages above will keep you supplied for a very long time.