Books like “The Three Coffins”

What to read after “The Three Coffins” by John Dickson Carr: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe · 1841
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
In a locked Paris apartment, a woman and her daughter are found brutally murdered with no sign of how the killer entered or left. The reclusive, eccentric C. Auguste Dupin takes up the case and solves it by pure reasoning, in the story often called the first detective tale.
2
Whose Body?
Dorothy L. Sayers · 1923
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Mistaken Identity
- Eccentric Detective
Lord Peter Wimsey is intrigued when a corpse is found in a bathtub wearing nothing but a pair of gold pince-nez, while a financier has gone missing. Aided by his butler Bunter and a Scotland Yard inspector, he works out how the body came to be there.
3
The Leavenworth Case
Anna Katharine Green · 1878
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Locked Room Mystery
- Twist Ending
When a retired merchant is shot in the library of his locked Manhattan mansion, no one could have left before the body was found. Detective Ebenezer Gryce and a young lawyer weigh the two nieces, the servants and a missing will in one of the first American detective novels.
4
Murder on the Orient Express
Agatha Christie · 1934
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
A snowdrift halts the Orient Express, and by morning an American passenger is found stabbed in his locked compartment. With the train stranded, Hercule Poirot questions thirteen passengers whose accounts do not add up, and uncovers the threads of an old crime.
5
The Innocence of Father Brown
G. K. Chesterton · 1911
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
A quiet Catholic priest with a mild manner and an eye for human nature solves impossible crimes that baffle the police. Across twelve stories he uncovers murderers, thieves and impostors, often relying on ordinary details that everyone else has overlooked.
6
The Red House Mystery
A. A. Milne · 1922
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Locked Room Mystery
- Twist Ending
At a country house party, the host's brother is found shot in a locked room and the host has vanished. Antony Gillingham, a guest with a taste for detective stories, and his friend Bill play at being Holmes and Watson, poking into the household's secrets before the police arrive.
7
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Locked Room Mystery
- Eccentric Detective
Twelve stories follow London's most observant detective and his friend Dr Watson as they untangle impossible crimes, strange clients and quiet suburban mysteries from their rooms on Baker Street.
8
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Agatha Christie · 1920
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Locked Room Mystery
- Eccentric Detective
When wealthy Emily Inglethorp is fatally poisoned at her country estate, the household is sealed off with a killer among the guests. Captain Hastings, home from the war, brings in his old acquaintance Hercule Poirot, a Belgian refugee detective, to work out who could have reached her locked bedroom.
9
The Poisoned Chocolates Case
Anthony Berkeley · 1929
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
- Twist Ending
A box of poisoned chocolates kills a man at his club, and the police can find no culprit. Six members of the Crimes Circle, an armchair detective society, each offer a different solution to the same murder, until amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham tests their theories against the facts.
10
The Moving Toyshop
Edmund Crispin · 1946
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
- Twist Ending
Poet Richard Cadogan arrives in Oxford, finds a woman's body in a toyshop and is knocked out. When he returns with the police the shop has become a grocer's. With his friend, eccentric professor Gervase Fen, he hunts for the vanished corpse and the trick behind the impossible scene.
11
The Silent Sister
Diane Chamberlain · 2014
Similar plot moves: “Faked Death” and “Twist Ending”
- Faked Death
- Twist Ending
After her father's death, Riley returns to their North Carolina house to settle his estate. Sorting through his papers, she finds evidence that her older sister, long believed to have killed herself as a teenager, may be alive and living under another name.
12
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins · 1868
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
- Twist Ending
A priceless yellow diamond looted from an Indian temple is left to Rachel Verinder on her birthday, and vanishes the same night. Family, servants, doctors and a famous detective each tell their part of the story as suspicion moves from one person to another.