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Cornwell's early stuff is very good but her more recent ones are really awful, She has declined a lot, imho. Anything from after the time she tried to go 'literary' is just dreadful.
Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series is very good, and consistently so. Same with the J.D. Robb series. Others I like, both old and new:
- Raymond Chandler is fun. There is also a series available at Fictionwise in mutltiformat which pays homage, except that the Marlowe-esque character is a dwarf from another dimension who accidentally gets sucked into 1930's mob Chicago, where he sets up a PI practice. I believe the author is Tee Morris.
- Holmes is fun. Jacques Futrelle, who came a little later, is similar in style (short stories and novellas all featuring a logic-and-deduction sort of PI) but Futrelle was more into the 'locked room' type of story. The novella I read of his had the main detective character bet he could escape from an unescapable prison cell within a certain time period.
- Other Conan Doyle contemporaries who get good reviews: the Arsene Lupin series by Maurice LeBlanc, the Raffles series, Chesterton's Father Brown...
- Then there is Sayers, Christie, Bramah, Anna Katharine Green, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Wilkie Collins...
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