Mystery/suspense/thrillers have never been top of my reading list and perhaps they should come under three different headings(?) but a visitor left me a copy of The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill, and it really held my attention; a true page-turner.
She has followed it with another so I suppose there will be a series.
I think the du Maurier books all 'stand alone' as do the works of Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell with her 'other' hat on).

Frieda, I don't know if I am on my own in not reading series of books, or even not following the books of a particular author one after another.
If I find a writer I enjoy I like to have a gap until I read another of his/her books . . . stringing out the pleasure.
And I'm probably the only person here who has never tasted anything from McDonalds and lived to tell the tale.

I don't care for mystery series, as I think the quality tends to deteriorate. Two come to mind, as stand-alones. I am sure you are familiar with Eco's "The Name of the Rose". Another of my all-time favorites is Barbara Vine's "The Chimney Sweeper's Boy."

I also liked "Dark Provenance" by M.D. Anthony.I don't read many mysteries these days, so assume it was a stand-alone.

First, the new snack wraps from Micky D's are quite tasty. I like them grilled with honey mustard.

I listen to many mysteries and nothing spectacular is coming to mind...except I loved Rose. All Martin Cruz Smiths books are good but Rose stood out.
Stuart Kaminskies books are some of my favorites with Rostnikov's adventures at the top. I think each book is a stand alone novel although they are a series.

I liked a Spy in Question by Tim Sebastian which is also espionage but not a series.

Dick Francis' books are mostly entertaining. I've only found a couple I thought were off.
Jack Higgins has gone way down hill but Cold Harbour is one of his best.
It doesn't qualify as a mystery but War of the Rats is an excellent suspenseful war novel.

How about :

Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca
Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue

?

I am a mystery series addict, and devotedly acquire and read them in order whenever possible. I enjoy watching the characters grow and change. There are, however, authors I like who never write the same characters twice-or stand-alones from my favorite series authors.

off the top of my head...

Foul Matter by Martha Grimes-not a Jury or an Emma, this stands alone and skewers the publishing industry.
The Blackheath Poisonings by Julian Symonds is non-series and creepy to the nth degree!
Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz is a one-off...I've never seen anything else by this author.

Arturo Perez-Reverte's initial novels were stand alones. After about 6 I guess his publisher insisted on a series, so he started the Captain Alatriste novels.

Elizabeth Peters has a couple of stand alone novels and almost all her Barbara Michaels' gothics are stand alone.

The Sharyn McCrumb ballad novels are a series only in that they all take place in the same area and have recurring characters, but they aren't the same characters with each novel.

I looked over my book logs for the last couple of years, while some of the authors do write series most of these listed write stand-alones:

Thomas Cook, Joseph Finder, Karin Slaughter, P.D.James, Nelson DeMille, Harlan Coben, David Baldacci, Lisa Gardner, Brad Meltzer, & Dennis LeHane...titles can be provided upon request...LOL!

Pat

These are all excellent stand-alones:

Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
Silent Joe, T. Jefferson Parker
Red Hook, Gabriel Cohen
Nine, Jan Burke
The King of Lies, John Hart

A real favorite of mine is 11 Harrow House by Gerald A. Browne. I suppose you should call it a crime novel, rather than a mystery. But it taught me all kinds of things about the diamond business, had a really ingenious method to pull off the heist and a great politically correct ending. I wish I could find all that in more books!

The first that came to mind was The Chimney Sweeper's Boy by Barbara Vine. There is another one by her where the very first line told you who was murdered, who did it and why and yet the suspense never let up. I think it was titled A Judgement In Stone.

gbg

I agree with Pat about Dennis Lehane. He has written a series using the same characters, but the stand alones Mystic River and Shutter Island were particularly good.

Tony Hillerman took a break from writing about the Southwest United States several years ago and penned a stand-alone book with new characters that took place in Southeast Asia: Finding Moon. I enjoyed it.

Motherless Brooklyn, mentioned above, is one of my favorite books.

Heh! Well, I asked and you all came through. Now I'm overwhelmed and don't know where to start responding!

Hmm, am I noticing a pattern? It seems as if police procedurals, thrillers, and courtroom-type crime novels are more likely than historicals and cozy-type mysteries to be one-offs and stand-alones. Is that true? Of course The Name of the Rose is a historical and it's definitely sui generis -- or it was until other writers began imitating it, but not anywhere as interestingly, in my opinion.

Also, I think several of the stand-alones mentioned are considered literary novels that just happen to also be mysteries -- crossovers, as it were, that manage to transcend the genre label and get literary recognition. Isn't that true of Motherless Brooklyn? I admit that I didn't really like Lethem's novel because after a while the main character's Tourette's Syndrome began to seem gimmicky to me. I realize that it is politically correct these days to present characters with all kinds of conditions and disabilities, and I suppose I'm politically incorrect to say that I am still sometimes uncomfortable when I suspect the disability is being exploited to make the character more interesting. I had the same problem with that "mystery" about the young man with Asperger's Syndrome.

Anyway, I am interested in literary-type mysteries. I read Ron Hansen's Atticus a few years ago and was quite taken with it. Others I've read and liked are Mr. White's Confession by Robert Clark and Atwood's Alias Grace. Pat, I've read Thomas Cook's Breakheart Hill and The Chatham School Affair. Are his others as good?

Bumblebeez, thank you. I've made note of War of the Rats. Sometimes I like war novels very much.

Vee, I'm mostly fuzzy about the categorization of mysteries/suspense/thrillers. Sometimes it's obvious what they are -- Miss Marple is not likely to ever be in the company of, say, Hermann Kohler and Jean-Louis St-Cyr -- but often there is so much overlap that I don't know what to call 'em.

Three more I thought of-

Devil in the White City Erik Larsen. Murder at the Chicago World's Fair

The Coffee Trader David Liss. Treachery in renaissance Amsterdam.

Overnight Float Clare Munnings (really Elizabeth T. Kennan and Jill Kerr Conway, two past Presidents of pretigious women's colleges...this was supposed to be the beginning of a series, but I've never seen another-skullduggery in the academic world. Well-done.)

I really liked Absent Friends by S. J. Rozan. It includes a mystery, but it deals with childhood friends who are adults in New York on September 11.

I very much enjoy her series with Lydia Chan, a NY Chinese PI with a very traditional mother and brothers, and Bill somebody, an older man from Kentucky, who work together to solve cases. She is an excellent writer, but I found AF to be exceptional.

She has a new one, In This Rain, also set in New York. I liked it but not as well as her others. It's also stand-alone.

My own contribution is And Then There Were None or Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie. As far as I know, this is her only mystery that does not include either Marple or Poirot.

I second Devil in the White City and The Coffee Trader. Both are great.

PAM

Pam, there are quite a few Chrities' that are stand alones. If you go to Fantastic Fiction and pull her up they have them all nicely listed according to detective and then the stand alones. That is what I love about that site.

gbg

Frieda I have read quite a few by Thomas Cook, including the two that you mentioned and enjoyed them all including his latest Red Leaves.

Pat

Frieda, you use the word outstanding so are you looking for a Mystery that is of superior quality in its literary style plus something that keeps you in suspense until the last page when you finally find out 'who dunnit'?
I think most of the above replies have picked up on the 'stand alone' part of your question/request.
I read very few mysteries/thrillers partly because I find I don't care who murdered Aunt Mavis, in the library with the ice-pick, but more often because I find the characterisation is not well done and I have no feeling for either Aunt Mavis, the Butler or even the Inspector from Scotland Yard or the FBI.
Other than the eccentricities of Poirot or Miss Marple do we learn anything about the sleuths or the baddies?
Greasy raincoats, snapped-brim hats or even aristocratic titles don't 'round out' a character much for me.
I wonder if anyone has a favourite who-dunnit believable 'character'.

Vee-that's why I like series. Granted, some are brain potato chips....which is not always a bad thing, mind you.....but the well-crafted series by P.D. James, Martha Grimes, Jane Haddam and even the Amelia series by Elizabeth Peters allow the author the luxury of character development along with the mystery. Martha Grimes stumbled in the middle of the Jury series, but she is back on track now. And I just like the puzzle-whether I loved Aunt Maudie or loathed her, I like turning over the pieces and figuring it out-or watching the detective do it!
Believable detectives-Jane Haddam's Gregor Demarkian, James' Dalgleish, J.J. Marric's Gideon.

Grimes' Jury rings true, but the other regulars are, in my opinion, a snook at stock mystery hangers-on...but I still love them....except for Aunt Agatha. Loathe the woman!
Peters' series started out almost as satire of the adventure stories of the Victorian age, but as she wrote them, the characters evened out-the books are still just a wild ride, partly due to the setting, but not so much of the "silent movie" broad farce. Believable???...in part. We all know people who happily boss, direct and interfere "because I know what's best for you" as Amelia does!

Agatha Christie wrote many mysteries without Poirot or Marple:
the list from the website Stop, You're Killing Me

Tuppence and Tommy Beresford, intelligence agents in England, are featured in: :
The Secret Adversary (1922)

Partners in Crime (1922) [SS]

N or M? (1941)
By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968)

Postern of Fate (1973)

Superintendent Battle, of Scotland Yard, and Bundle Brent are featured in:
The Secret of Chimneys (1925)

The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)
Towards Zero (1944)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Non-series:
The Man in the Brown Suit (1924)

The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1930)

The Sittaford Mystery (1931)
APA: The Murder at Hazelmoor (1931)

Why DidnÂt They Ask Evans (1934)
APA: Boomerang Clue

Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective (1934)
APA: Parker Pyne Investigates

And Then There Were None (1939)
APA: Ten Little Indians (1965)

Sparkling Cyanide(1945)
APA: Remember Death (1945)

Death Comes as the End (1945)

Crooked House (1949)

They Came to Bagdad (1951)

Destination Unknown (1954)
APA: So Many Steps to Death (1955)

Ordeal by Innocence (1958)

The Pale Horse (1961)

Endless Night (1967)

Passenger to Frankfort (1970)

Vee, yeah, I'm as interested in the outstanding part as I am the stand-alone. There are a lot of mediocre though entertaining-enough mysteries and probably a lot more poorly-realized ones; but the truly outstanding are few, though they wouldn't be outstanding if they were plentiful, I suppose. The trouble is I no longer have the patience to wade through all the muck -- the desire for instant gratification is strong and I'm spoilt, I admit.so are you looking for a Mystery that is of superior quality in its literary style plus something that keeps you in suspense until the last page when you finally find out 'who dunnit'?Yes, Vee, you've succinctly pegged exactly what I want. Heh! I don't ask for too much, do I?

Cece mentioned Larsen's Devil in the White City: it is classified as nonfiction (just checked at Amazon to make sure), but it is written in the narrative style of a novel to tell the story -- actually two stories, intertwined. Larsen does the same thing with his latest, Thunderstruck, which is about Marconi and his telegraph and Dr. Crippen and Ethel LeNeve's love affair that resulted in Crippen going off his rocker and killing his very annoying wife. It doesn't matter that I already know what happened: it's the telling of the story, again, and in such a fascinating way that makes the sordidness riveting, in my opinion. That's what I want.

Fictionalized accounts, based on true-life mysteries, can be just as enthralling, sometimes. A couple of oldie favorites are F. Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See the Peepshow and Ernest Raymond's We, the Accused (both, thanks to Jankin). Though not fictionalized, Dorothy Sayers's analysis of the Julia Wallace murder is so good that it hardly matters that the case is now believed to be solved.

Sometimes it's not just "whodunnit" but why and how. I like the puzzle aspect, sometimes more than the characterizations though in a psychological mystery the character development is, of course, very important -- utmost, I'd say. Toss in atmosphere and intriguing times (why I love gothics and historicals) and I'm even happier. Series can be good, but I think there are too damned many of them to keep up with. I'm a sampler by nature and don't want a steady diet of any one genre. People who can read one type of book day after day, week after week...well, I can admire their immersion and how they can become experts, but I often wonder, I admit, if their development was arrested for some reason.

I don't know how outstanding they are, or if they're considered mysteries, but I can recommend Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s both from the Library of America.

Frieda, did you look at Absent Friends on Amazon? I believe it answers both your criteria; it is certainly well written.

freida-after reading your last post, I would again recommend both The Coffee Trader and Drowning Ruth. I think they would meet the criteria you articulated.

Carolyn, I've been looking up every title mentioned so far, but just got to Absent Friends this morning. I haven't read any of the novels about 9/11 yet -- I think I'm still a bit squeamish to relinquish that horrendous episode to fiction. However, I will come to that point and Rozan's story certainly sounds interesting. The synopsis confused me, though: is this fiction based on actual people and incidents?

disputantum, mysteries or crime or suspense, those noir novels in the anthologies are definitely outstanding in my mind. I think I've read most of them and have seen most of the films, too. In some cases, I think the films improved on the novels, or at least added another dimension of interpretation -- from Nicholas Ray to Truffaut to Robert Altman and many others. I often have a profound distaste for screenwriters and directors who tamper with books, but somehow crime/mystery novels can be tinkered with and played more loosely.

Cece, looking at that list of Christie's non-series mysteries: I never realized that she wrote so many non-Poirot and Marple. The thing I love about Christie -- and this may sound contradictory -- is I promptly forget the plots and whodunnit, so every few years I can reread and enjoy them just as much. The only one I remember well is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and I guess that makes it outstanding. But, in a way, that's a shame 'cause I can never be shocked and riled up by it again!

Thanks, Cece. The Coffee Trader and Drowning Ruth do look right up my alley. I probably overlooked the latter because it was an Oprah pick -- sometimes my reasoning for dismissing something is initially faulty.

I would also recommend Thomas Cook-his novels are definitely of the mystery/suspense genre and most are quite unique. I believe he has a new one just out(since Red Leaves). I'm sure I would have more recommendations in this area but since I'm not home I don't have access to my books or lists

I wonder how you would rate Truman Capote's In Cold Blood in a 'stand alone' setting?
I've just listened to a BBC radio discussion on it in the popular programme 'A Good Read'. The speakers gave it an excellent talk-up, remarking that in today's journalism . . . post Capote . . . the I word comes up far too often.
I realise it is a 'true' story, but does this detract from the book's strength or do you prefer your mysteries/thrillers storyline to be made-up?
Would anyone recommend it?

Without my usual hesitation, I wholeheartedly recommend In Cold Blood. It is an excellent, completely chilling book.

The advantage of reading thrillers (I seldom read mysteries) that are not true is that you can always tell yourself that it did not really happen. In Cold Blood was all the more horrific because it did happen.

I suppose In Cold Blood would fall more in the true crime category than in the mystery/thriller category.

You might also like Midwives-although there is suspense, it is not a pure mystery per se-more a study of the lengths to which characters will go when placed under unbearable stress. It was one of our best book club discussions.

Absent Friends is purely fiction. One of the friends is a firefighter and bad things happen, but I didn't feel any 9/11 qualms about reading it. It's all from the personal standpoints of the group.

Cece, Midwives has been added to my burgeoning list. I go from not having anything I really want to read to having almost too much...nah! that's not possible.

Carolyn, I've ordered Absent Friends and I'll let you know when I get around to reading it.

Vee, I agree with Frances. In Cold Blood is one of only half a dozen -- maybe a dozen -- true-crime books that are certifiable classics. Capote called his book a "nonfiction novel" because he didn't want to stick to the journalistic style of recounting true crime. He wasn't exactly the first writer to do this with a murder story; but because he was so personally involved, he carried it beyond what most journos had previously done. In the forty years since In Cold Blood was published it is true that the "I" in journalism has become much more obvious, but I don't know that Capote was responsible so much for it. Capote wasn't primarily a journalist: he was a creative literary writer and a peculiar personality, neither of which would make journalists turn out in droves to emulate him. No, I think the transition was more subtle and accumulative.

I only found out recently that Capote fudged on some facts about the Clutter family's personal problems and he even inserted or changed around some incidents to suit his needs. Do these inaccuracies make his book less powerful, emotionally? Probably not. He was canny, though, to give it the new label: "nonfiction novel".