OK, time for the results of my quiz from a couple of days ago – namely because somebody got one bit of it right. Namely which of the ten books listed from the Crime Writers’ Association Top 100 books have I actually read. The list in question was, in case you’ve forgotten, was the following:

1. Raymond Chandler – The Big Sleep
2. Dashiell Hammett – The Maltese Falcon
3. Dorothy L Sayers – Gaudy Night
4. Francis Iles – Malice Aforethought
5. John Buchan – The Thirty-Nine Steps
6. Margery Allingham – The Tiger In The Smoke
7. Patricia Highsmith – Strangers On A Train
8. Reginald Hill – Deadheads
9. P D James – A Taste For Death
10. Nicholas Blake – The Beast Must Die

Ten books (or authors at least) that any self-respecting crime reviewer should have read. But who said I had any self-respect…

Anyway, for those who felt like deducing things, you can eliminate Chandler and Hammett straight off, due to their noir-ness, and Buchan for his thriller-ness (although the theory that I might have read it at school was a good one.) Never got on with PD James, never liked the idea of the inverted mystery (so no Iles) and I’m in no rush to return to Sayers and Allingham as implied by my reviews of them. I think the most likely wrong answer was the Blake book – it’s actually sitting on my shelf – but the correct answer is Deadheads. And for the record, while I do generally enjoy Hill a lot, this one left me flat, for exactly the same spoilery reason that other praise it.

Congrats to Ben Hakala who worked it out and Santosh Iyer who remembered that I mentioned that I’d read it when I reviewed Child’s Play a couple of years ago…

Actually, I thought people would guess it a little earlier as the other nine books on the list are cast-iron classics and there are plenty more that could have been on the list. So Deadheads stood out as an odd choice if it was a red herring, so therefore the only reason for it being on the list is if it was the answer…

But nobody came close to the magic number of how many books in the list that I’ve actually read.

The books from the Top 100 that I’ve read are:

• Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time (1951)
• Agatha Christie: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
• Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None (1939)
• Edmund Crispin: The Moving Toyshop (1946)
• Peter Lovesey: The False Inspector Dew (1982)
• E. C. Bentley: Trent’s Last Case (1913)
• Ed McBain: Cop Hater
• Colin Dexter: The Dead of Jericho (1981)
• John Dickson Carr: The Hollow Man (1935)
• Anthony Berkeley: The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929)
• Ellis Peters: A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977)
• Peter Lovesey: Bertie and the Tinman (1987)
• Reginald Hill: Under World (1988)
• Reginald Hill: Dead Heads (1983)
• Caroline Graham: The Killings at Badger’s Drift (1987)
• Agatha Christie: Death Comes as the End (1945)
• Christianna Brand: Green for Danger (1945)
• Cyril Hare: Tragedy at Law (1942)
• Peter Lovesey: Wobble to Death (1970)
• H. R. F. Keating: The Murder of the Maharajah (1980)

So the magic number is… twenty. Yup, that sounds pretty weak for a crime reviewer and no one guessed even close to it, but I’ll be honest, there’s not a vast amount of books on the list that I haven’t read and still want to read. As I’ve mentioned before, the blog is a catalogue of what I read and I read what I want to read. I might read more Sayers or Allingham if I feel like it, but there’s no sense of duty there.

Looking at the list, there are a few that are on my radar – namely:

• Francis Iles: Malice Aforethought
• Nicholas Blake: The Beast Must Die

… and that’s about it, really. Nothing else really leaps out. But if you want completeness, do pop over to Past Offences where Rich has read and reviewed all of the 100 books.