Private eyes
The tarnished world of the hard-boiled American gumshoe produced some of the sharpest (and most sardonic) writing in all crime fiction. The wisecracking private dick may suffer endless beatings, but the seductive, duplicitous blonde clients (and the whisky bottle in the filing cabinet) ensure that he's a hero who keeps coming back for more. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett are the twin gods of the genre, but modern writers such as Robert B. Parker keep the tradition in rude health.

Golden age crime
Conan Doyle created the greatest of all fictional detectives in Sherlock Holmes, ensconced in 221b Baker Street with violin, 7 per cent cocaine solution and faithful amanuensis Watson. Formidably intelligent and asexual, Holmes provided the blueprint for Agatha Christie's durable Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (though Christie detractors regard him as a series of tics and eccentricities). Christie's other immortal creation is, of course, the busybody spinster Miss Marple. And the other Golden Age Goodies are legion: Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr et al.

Police procedurals
Forget the endless - and often anodyne - TV adaptations: the place to really savour the heavy hitters among the literary coppers is on the printed page, in the company of Ian Rankin's bolshie DI Rebus, P.D. James's lonely aesthete Dalgliesh or Colin Dexter's curmudgeonly Morse. And don't forget John Harvey's jazz-loving Charlie Resnick.

The specialists
The success of John Grisham made every other lawyer on the planet realise that they could make even more money by writing legal thrillers. The result? We now have a sub-genre groaning under a slew of Grisham imitators with their many lawyer protagonists, most lacking the slick skill of the original. But there are other professionals (apart from the coppers) vying for our attention: the forensic pathologists of Patricia Cornwell and company (usually female, invariably described on the jacket as “feisty”), and canny criminal profilers such as Val McDermid's Dr Tony Hill.

Psychological crime
Dostoevsky may have kick-started it all with Crime and Punishment, but the American Patricia Highsmith and the British Ruth Rendell (particularly under her Barbara Vine nom de plume) have taken the crime novel into some dark psychological waters. Recent practitioners such as Minette Walters, Andrew Taylor and Laura Wilson continue to usher us into ever more disturbing realms of psychopathology.

Historical crime
If you've had enough of the graffiti-covered 21st century, why not investigate murder and conspiracy in Ancient Rome with the anachronistic sleuths of Stephen Saylor and Lindsey Davis? Or join the beleaguered investigators in the Third Reich of Robert Harris or Philip Kerr? Or sample the medieval bloodshed of Ellis Peters and C.J. Sansom?

American Gothic
English crime fiction too parochial for you? A taste of James Lee Burke's pungently atmospheric Bayou crime may tickle your palate - with, perhaps, an ancillary trip into the phantasmagoric Los Angeles of his fellow American titan, James Ellroy. But if your taste is for Gothic of truly operatic proportions, the blood-drenched serial killer novels of Thomas Harris may be just the ticket.

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