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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9268800" data-attributes="member: 7044704">Much the same - I'm not one for organized full read-throughs on bigger mystery authors, it's enough trouble just getting everything (or was, before e-books).  Read them as I could get them as a kid, mostly, which led to occasional jarring temporal glitch like Archie dealing with Hoover's FBI in one book and then being in Army intelligence during WW2, or Alleyn & Whimsey's being married, then suddenly single.  Still, relative few are sequential enough to spoil anything - the big one is probably A Family Affair from Stout, which you don't want to read early on.  Probably also better to read his Too Many Cooks before A Right To Die too, and ignore the mains' increasingly apparent immortality - no doubt derived from that formula Lord Greystoke uses.  There must be a fanfic where Wolfe and Archie get Tarzan or Jane off on a murder rap while they're visiting NYC or something.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />If you want a couple of more series to consider, I enjoyed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Hambly" target="_blank">Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January</a> novels (grim as their time period is), although their mystery elements are sometimes a bit of a sideshow to the setting and character development.  Of course she also wrote a fair bit of quite decent and often atypical fantasy in her earlier days, of which the Darwath series was my favorite.  Still strange to me that she's known mostly as a mystery writer these days.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I'd also suggest looking at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Dee" target="_blank">Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee stories</a>, both the English translation of the original 18th century Cases of Judge Dee (or Di, if you prefer) and his numerous self-written sequels to it.  While he obviously wasn't Chinese, van Gulik is respectful of the historical culture he's drawing upon and pastiches the style of historical novel pretty effectively while adapting the writing style and plot structure to be more accessible to "modern" (ie 1960s, so almost 70 years ago - this stuff isn't perfectly PC, obviously) English readers.  Interesting albeit fictionalized look at Tang Dynasty China and the Confucian justice system, if nothing else.  Just don't go into it expecting a supernatural SFX show like the modern movies you may have seen.  None of that to be found here.</blockquote>

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