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It’s time to get obsessive about the beautiful Penguin Classic Crime and Espionage series!
Collecting the Penguin Classic Crime novel series isn’t just about the books – it’s about stepping into a world of timeless tales and iconic characters.
As an actual penguin detective with a keen eye for detail myself, I know the value of a well-crafted mystery.
From the suave cunning of James Bond to the hard-boiled grit of Philip Marlowe, these stories have shaped the genre and left a fishy mark on literary history. In a good way.
Start your collection today, and let the Penguin Classic Crime and Espionage series be your guide through the shadowy alleys of classic crime!
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We encourage you to always source books from your local independent bookshop. However, we understand this is sometimes not practical based on location or budget.
Therefore, this post contains Amazon affiliate links. This means, if you click on the link and purchase the book from that link, I get a few dollars at no extra cost to you! This way we can both stock up on Penguin Crime fiction! 😀
Happy Sleuthing, Friends!
Series or Standalone?:
This is a standalone novel.
"Beast in the Shadows" Book Blurb:
A mystery writer turns detective to protect the woman he loves. But is he hunter or hunted? The chance meeting between a crime novelist and a married woman blossoms into friendship. When she confides to him that she has been receiving threatening and sadistic letters from an ex-lover, who says he is watching her in the shadows, he knows he must help her. But the trail unexpectedly leads to another writer, Oe Shundei, the mysterious and secretive author of works of grotesque violence. Suddenly nothing is as it seems, and nobody is safe.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"Brat Farrar" Book Blurb:
An imposter has a fortune to win and his life to lose in this gripping country house mystery. A stranger enters the Ashby family home posing as Patrick Ashby, the heir to the family’s sizeable fortune. The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick’s mannerisms, appearance and every significant detail of Patrick’s early life, up to his thirteenth year when he disappeared and was thought to have drowned himself. It seems as if Brat is going to pull off this most incredible deception – until old secrets emerge that threaten to jeopardise the imposter’s plan and his very life.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book One in the ‘George Smiley’ series.
"Call for the Dead" Book Blurb:
An apparent suicide. A deepening mystery. A letter from a dead man. Secret agent George Smiley is in trouble. A Foreign Office civil servant, Samuel Fennan, has killed himself, and Smiley realises that Intelligence head Maston is going to set him up to take the blame. Beginning his own investigation, Smiley is shocked to receive an urgent letter from the dead man, and slowly uncovers a network of deceit and betrayal. Le Carré’s debut novel was also the first of his many books to feature the tenacious, unassuming and singular George Smiley.
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Series or Standalone?:
This is Book 2 in the ‘Judge Dee‘ series.
"The Chinese Gold Murders" Book Blurb:
Judge Dee is about to step into the shoes of a dead man. Most people would refuse the job of Magistrate at the lonely port town of Peng-lai – especially as the last occupant of the post has been found poisoned in his library, his papers missing. But Judge Dee is not most men. He arrives ready to get to the truth, only to find his life complicated even further by a missing bride, a vanished artisan, a man-eating tiger and an evil conspiracy.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book 7 in the ‘Harlem Detectives‘ series.
"Cotton Comes to Harlem" Book Blurb:
Black flim-flam man Deke O’Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta’s state penitentiary than he’s back on the streets working the scam of a lifetime. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement he’s counting on the big Harlem rally to produce a big collection-for his own private charity. But the take – $87,000 – is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everybody wants to get his hands on. With Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones on everyone’s trail and piecing together the complexity of the scheme, Cotton Comes to Harlem is one of Himes’s hardest-hitting and most entertaining thrillers.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book 5 in the ‘James Bond‘ series.
"From Russia With Love" Book Blurb:
Deep inside the Soviet Union, a plot to ruin the British secret service takes shape. Under the guidance of the appalling Rosa Klebb, the spy-killing agency SMERSH come up with a trap which will not only assassinate the formidable James Bond but discredit everything he seemed to stand for. The trap is set in Istanbul – a beautiful girl, an invaluable Soviet coding machine – and lurking in the shadows the psychopath, Grant.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book One in the ‘Calder and Behrens‘ series.
"Game Without Rules" Book Blurb:
Two secret agents living in the English countryside try – and fail – to live a quiet life, in these hugely enjoyable crime stories. Behrens and Calder are two secret agents living in the English countryside, desperately seeking a quiet life. But despite their best efforts, they find themselves repeatedly obliged to wipe out a host of brutal and ingenious traitors, Soviet spies and old Nazis.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book 6 in the ‘Akechi Kogoro‘ series.
"Gold Mask" Book Blurb:
Can an ace detective outwit a thief with many faces? They call him ‘Gold Mask’: a fiendishly clever master of disguise whose crime spree has shocked Tokyo. The dogged detective Akechi Kogoro is on the trail, and soon the two become locked in a frenzied battle of wits as his seemingly superhuman nemesis leads a chase across Japan, gleefully tricking the police at every turn. Will this ingenious villain’s true identity be revealed – and will he, eventually, make a mistake?
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Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone nove.
"I Married a Dead Man" Book Blurb:
A wild and wildly compelling noir novel about a train crash and a case of a mistaken identity. What if you woke up to discover everyone thought you were somebody else? Pregnant and abandoned, all Helen Georgesson has is five dollars and a one-way ticket to San Francisco. Then she is involved in a train crash, and regains consciousness only to discover that she has given birth – and, in a bizarre twist of fate, has been mistaken for somebody else. Helen decides to claim this opportunity to make a new life for herself and her son. But eventually her past will catch up with her, in terrible ways.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"In a Lonely Place" Book Blurb:
Los Angeles, the late 1940’s. A serial killer stalks the foggy streets at night. Dix Steele, a former fighter pilot, moved to L.A. after the war, looking for a new life. But the city is gripped by fear of a murderer in its midst. Dix, however, is not scared. And when he bumps into his old friend Brub, now a detective on the trail of the culprit, he is excited to follow the police’s progress. A dark and terrible truth is revealed, in a noir novel like no other.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"Journey Into Fear" Book Blurb:
1940. An unassuming English engineer has travelled to Turkey on business. And somebody wants him dead. It all began when Graham was taken to a nightclub in Istanbul and noticed a man in a crumpled suit, watching him. Then he narrowly missed being killed by gunfire on returning to his hotel room. Now, terrified, he has been helped to escape in secret on a passenger steamer home. But although Graham may try to run, he cannot hide from his pursuers forever, and soon he is caught up in a nightmare beyond his control.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book 47 in the ‘Inspector Maigret‘ series.
"Maigret and the Headless Corpse" Book Blurb:
The discovery of a dismembered body leads Maigret into one of his strangest cases yet. When a man’s headless body is pulled from the Canal Saint Martin, Maigret and his colleagues are puzzled. In a chance encounter at a local cafe Maigret uncovers the truth behind this disturbing murder in an intriguing story of an estranged family, adulterous affairs and a secret inheritance.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book 40 in the ‘Inspector Maigret‘ series.
"Maigret's Revolver" Book Blurb:
Maigret goes to London on the trail of a young man on the run. The most exasperating of all was the head clerk at reception, in his elegant morning coat and stiff collar, which was not wilting with a drop of perspiration. He was treating Maigret in a cordial way, or possibly feeling sorry for him, as from time to time he flashed him a smile, intended to be both complicit and encouraging.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book 6 in the ‘Inspector Maigret‘ series.
"Night at the Crossroads" Book Blurb:
Maigret has been interrogating Carl Andersen for seventeen hours without a confession. He’s either innocent or a very good liar. So why was the body of a diamond merchant found at his isolated mansion? Why is his sister always shut away in her room? And why does everyone at Three Widows Crossroads have something to hide?
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Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"Other Paths to Glory" Book Blurb:
A First World War battlefield hides a deadly secret – one that some are willing to kill for. Paul Mitchell is a young military historian whose life is changed forever when two men, Dr Audley and Colonel Butler of the MOD, visit him with a fragment of a German trench map – and a lot of questions. Then somebody tries to kill him. Paul, his life now in danger, agrees to go underground on a mission to solve a dangerous mystery: what really happened during the battle of the Somme in 1916? And why does somebody want to keep it secret?
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Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"Payment Deferred" Book Blurb:
There is nothing more dangerous than a desperate man. Bank clerk William Marble is facing financial ruin – until a visit from a wealthy young relative, a bottle of Cyanide and a shovel offer him an unexpected solution. But there is no such thing as the perfect murder. Gradually Marble becomes poisoned by guilt and fear, and his entire family corrupted. Sooner or later his deed will catch up with him, as events spiral out of control in the most unpredictable of ways.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book One in the ‘Leo and Serendipity‘ series.
"Sleeping Dogs" Book Blurb:
For the unlikely crime-busting duo Leo and Serendipity, a missing dog is only the start of their troubles. Leo Bloodworth, ‘the Bloodhound’, is a world-weary L.A. gumshoe with a reputation for finding anything – and a low tolerance of precocious teenagers. Serendipity Dahlquist is a precocious teenager. When the headstrong, roller-skating fourteen-year-old asks Bloodworth to help track down her lost dog Groucho, it leads this oddest of odd couples into the dark criminal underworld of the Mexican mafia, and into more trouble than they’d bargained for.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"SS-GB" Book Blurb:
In February 1941 British Command surrendered to the Nazis. Churchill has been executed, the King is in the Tower and the SS are in Whitehall. For nine months Britain has been occupied – a blitzed, depressed and dingy country. However, it’s `business as usual’ at Scotland Yard run by the SS when Detective Inspector Archer is assigned to a routine murder case. Life must go on. But when SS Standartenfuhrer Huth arrives from Berlin with orders from the great Himmler himself to supervise the investigation, the resourceful Archer finds himself caught up in a high level, all action, espionage battle. This is a spy story quite different from any other.
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Series or Standalone? :
This collects Books One and Two in the ‘Philip Marlowe‘ series.
"The Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely" Book Blurb:
Two great novels featuring hard-boiled Californian detective Philip Marlowe. Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Marlowe’s entanglement with the Sternwood family – and an attendant cast of colourful underworld figures – is the background to a story reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the great American Dream. The hard-boiled detective’s iconic image burns just as brightly in Farewell My Lovely, on the trail of a missing nightclub crooner.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is part of the ‘Akechi Kogoro‘ series.
"Elementary, She Read" Book Blurb:
A master criminal and a master detective are locked in battle. Who will win? They call her the ‘Dark Angel’. Queen of Tokyo’s underworld, Mme Midorikawa is famed for her beauty, her jewels and the tattoo of a black lizard on her arm. Crime is so easy for her that she warns her victims in advance. When a wealthy jewel merchant receives letters saying his precious daughter Sanae is about to be kidnapped, he entrusts the renowned detective Akechi Kogoro to protect her. But he may have met his deadliest adversary yet..
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Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"The Deadly Percheron" Book Blurb:
Who stole George Matthews’ life? When a wealthy young man turns up at respected psychiatrist Dr George Matthews’ office uttering these words, it changes his safe existence forever. Suddenly Matthews finds himself dragged into a strange, surreal world where nothing is certain. And when an actress is found murdered, a horse tied up outside her apartment, Matthews loses his memory – and must find it in a nightmarish urban jungle of mistaken identities, secrets and insanity.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book 2 in the ‘Lew Archer‘ series.
"The Drowning Pool" Book Blurb:
Maude Slocum is in trouble. But luckily trouble is Investigator Lew Archer’s business. A well-dressed, wealthy woman has arrived at Archer’s L.A. office, having intercepted a poison pen letter accusing her of adultery. Reluctantly agreeing to help her find the culprit, he dives into the Slocums’ moneyed, oil-rich California world. But when Maude’s mother-in-law is found dead in the swimming pool, secrets come to the surface too. For the urbane, world-weary Archer, a case of blackmail soon becomes murder.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book 3 in the ‘Inspector Alan Grant‘ series.
"The Franchise Affair" Book Blurb:
Abducted, beaten, hidden in an attic, a young woman stages an audacious escape. But is her story everything she claims it to be? Fifteen-year-old Betty Kane can recall every detail of the room where she says she was held at the country house known as The Franchise – even the crack in its round window. But her alleged kidnappers, a quiet-living mother and daughter, claim they have never seen her before. Somebody has to be lying. But who? As the case sparks a media frenzy, it is up to unassuming village solicitor Robert Blair to find out.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"The Labyrinth Makers" Book Blurb:
A missing plane resurfaces – and so do long-submerged secrets. An RAF Dakota, presumed lost at sea during World War Two, has just been discovered at the bottom of a drained lake over twenty years later – complete with the skeletal remains of the pilot and a strange cargo of rubble. Why are the Soviets so interested in it, even attending the dead man’s funeral? Why has unassuming civil servant David Audley been tasked with leading the investigation – and what was the plane carrying that some will kill for?
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book One in the ‘Charles Latimer‘ series.
"The Mask of Dimitrios" Book Blurb:
English crime novelist Charles Latimer is travelling in Istanbul when he makes the acquaintance of Turkish police inspector Colonel Haki. It is from him that he first hears of the mysterious Dimitrios – an infamous master criminal, long wanted by the law, whose body has just been fished out of the Bosphorus. Fascinated by the story, Latimer decides to retrace Dimitrios’ steps across Europe to gather material for a new book. But, as he gradually discovers more about his subject’s shadowy history, fascination tips over into obsession. And, in entering Dimitrios’ criminal underworld, Latimer realises that his own life may be on the line.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"The Night Manager" Book Blurb:
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Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"The Night of the Hunter" Book Blurb:
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book 16 in the ‘Lew Archer‘ series.
"The Underground Man" Book Blurb:
Private Detective Lew Archer doesn’t believe in coincidences. A forest fire has mysteriously broken out in the hills above southern California. Meanwhile, Lew Archer has been asked by a desperate mother to find her six-year-old son. Instead, he discovers the boy’s wealthy father, murdered, and buried in a hole in the ground. The mystery will lead Archer to unearth a tragic, years-old history of abandonment, obsession and illusion, where the past won’t let go of the present – and everything is connected.
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Series or Standalone? :
This is Book 5 in the ‘George Smiley‘ series.
"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" Book Blurb:
A Russian mole has infiltrated the British establishment – and the spymaster Smiley must dig them out. George Smiley, formerly of the Secret Intelligence Service, is contemplating his new life in retirement when he is called back on an unexpected mission. His task is to hunt down an agent implanted by Moscow Central at the very heart of the Circus – one who has been buried deep there for years. The dogged, troubled Smiley can discount nobody from being the traitor, even if it is one of those closest to him.
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Series or Standdalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"We Have Always Lived in the Castle" Book Blurb:
Living in the Blackwood family home with only her sister Constance and her Uncle Julian for company, Merricat just wants to preserve their delicate way of life. But ever since Constance was acquitted of murdering the rest of the family, the world isn’t leaving the Blackwoods alone. And when Cousin Charles arrives, armed with overtures of friendship and a desperate need to get into the safe, Merricat must do everything in her power to protect the remaining family.
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