In case you are not aware, most of the titles discussed in the article are available for free as high quality ebooks at https://standardebooks.org because they are in the public domain. I have read way too many detective novels since discovering this website.

Sherlock Holmes said it best :-)

“Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! But, indeed, if you are trivial, I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools.

-- From "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Every kid should be given a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes canon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_of_Sherlock_Holmes) This will turn them towards learning and practicing "The Art of Deduction (or Ratiocination according to Edgar Allan Poe)" like nothing else and will directly lead to them understanding the importance of Logic and Science/Mathematics in today's world.

For example, as a kid growing up in 80s India, i read whatever i could get my hands on (eg. Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Enid Blyton, Alistair Maclean, Desmond Bagley, Frederick Forsyth etc. etc.) but none of them really made a mark. Then somebody gave me a copy of "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes" and i was zapped. Here was somebody who focused on reasoning and showed you the steps involved. Of course once you grew-up you realized that much of the "Deductions" were far-fetched/implausible but nevertheless the fire was lit. It directly led to my interest in Science/Mathematics and then a career in Software (much of Holmes' methods are directly applicable to Debugging).

A bit all over the place. If you include bond, which is not detective fiction but exclude rebus which is ... I mean sure, it's a nice read, but crime fiction is alive and well.

Robert Harris comes to mind too.

If the point is that whodunit has moved on, so has almost every other genre.

The TV series Columbo was a brilliant inversion of the British deceive story. Naturally, every story started with an upper-class murder, but from the start the audience was shown who the killer was and how the crime was committed.

The "mystery" was how the detective was going to figure it out.

For anyone who's a big fan of the classic "puzzle mystery" type novel (I am so much I named a python library after it[0])- I would massively recommend also checking out some works in the Japanese Honkaku canon[1]. It's heavily inspired by the likes of Christie, Sayers, Marsh but with a heavy emphasis on "fair play", and also often, a lot more gore.

[0] https://github.com/benrutter/wimsey / https://codeberg.org/benrutter/wimsey

[1] https://killerthrillers.net/honkaku-detective-fiction/

Someone here mentioned the David Audley series by Anthony Price. I enjoyed it and will recommend it again. Although the starting premise is espionage, the stories are all detective mysteries. The plot is always intertwined with historical periods of Britain.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/59006-dr-david-audley-colon...

The classic stories described in the article may have died out in print form, but many of the tropes live on healthily in British TV. There's a vast range of charismatic, rationally insightful detectives to choose from. Granted, a lot of them are police officers which isn't true to the spirit of the article, but many are amateurs. I saw the genre referred to once as "cosy mystery" which pretty much hits it on the head (with, presumably, a candlestick.)

Robert Harris

Ann Cleeves

Robert Galbraith

Richard Osman

Tim Sullivan

Janice Hallett

Ian Rankin

JR Ellis

Alexander McCall Smith

And those are authors I'm reading because they were featured on some Kindle lists.

https://www.athabascau.ca/syllabi/cmns/cmns358.html

This course, which I took a while back, was curiously extremely focused on pulp detective novels. I got the sense that it was a tenured professors hobby or something. Interesting, nonetheless.

ot but sherlock holmes, the most popular detective of them all spends several years of his life working for British counter espionage before ww1, thwarting his German rival. This before mi5 existed! I find it remarkable how conan doyle also managed to pioneer the spy novel genre.