Penguin have reissued 50 classic crime novels as a new Green Popular Penguins series in Australia. What do you make of their list – and what would you add to yours?

One of the literary sensations of my early teens was a thick paperback called The Book of Lists. Many were offbeat and weird and from memory, a lot had a sexual theme: “The ten most famous people to have died during sex” – that kind of thing. My friends and I devoured the book and its sequels, quizzed each other on them and argued which list was the most interesting.

I was reminded of The Book of Lists when I heard Penguin Books was re-releasing 50 of its crime fiction classics. The list is a mix of perennial favourites and re-issued titles and according the Penguin website, includes “some of the most interesting and influential crime writers of all time."

Picking 50 crime classics, now that’s an ambitious list. Too highbrow for The Book of Lists, but people who read crime fiction will have strong opinions about who is included and who got left out and shouldn’t have been – and I’m no exception.It’s smart marketing, too – and fair enough, as any publisher prepared to take a punt on reprinting 50 old books and selling the relatively cheap price of $9.95, deserves to make a profit out of it.

How comprehensive is Penguin's list? Three quick caveats before I weigh in. First, I have no idea the rights restrictions Penguin faced. Second, I won’t try and define the term "classic", except to say looking at the list we’re talking older books, which means, for the most part, dead authors. That means no James Lee Burke or Val McDermid. Third, as befits such a large canon of writing, I’ll fess up now to not having heard of all of the authors (who is EC Bentley, anybody?)

To say the list is Anglo-centric is an understatement. Much of it is the literary equivalent of meat and three veg in front of ABC 1 on a Friday night. It’s also a bit chap heavy. Edgar Wallace, John Creasey and Earle Stanley Gardner all have more than one title represented. These authors penned solid thrillers and certainly sold a lot (Creasey wrote over 600 books under 28 pseudonyms). My dad loved them. But are they classics?

Many of the inclusions are obvious: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Poe, Hammett, Ruth Rendell (writing as Barbara Vine) and Chandler. Curiously, in addition to The Long Goodbye, it includes Playback, the last book Chandler wrote and generally thought of as his weakest. It’s also good to see the list give a nod to the more pulpy and noir side of crime fiction, by including Charles Willeford’s Miami Blues and Chester Hime’s A Rage In Harlem.

What I found most interesting is what the list says about the changing nature of crime fiction. Some books once considered crime are so popular they must now be classified as general mainstream literature – there's a complete absence of Agatha Christie or Ian Fleming on this list, for instance. Meanwhile, books once not considered crime – Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, both included – now easily slot into the genre. Du Maurier fits particularly well, given the popularity of dark, thrillers about woman in psychological danger.

As for what’s missing, in keeping with the theme of this piece, a brief list is in order. If rights were no issue, and I could build my perfect list of 50 crime classics from any publisher, I'd want to add the following:

• Pretty much anything non-Anglo. How about The Laughing Policeman by the Swedish husband and wife team Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, or one of the many novels by Japanese writer Seicho Matsumoto? That’s just for starters. If we could expand beyond classic titles, we could be here all day.

• Australian writers. I would have thought at least one book from Arthur Upfield’s Boney series should rate a mention. Similarly Charlotte Jay’s 1952 psychological thriller Beat Not the Bones, is worthy of inclusion.

• In terms of the US hard-boiled writers of the late forties/early fifties, James M Caine, Jim Thompson and Dorothy Hughes (who wrote In A Lonely Place, on which the 1950 Nicholas Ray film of the same name was based), would make my list.

• At least one book by Donald Westlake, preferably the first of his Parker series, The Hunter.

• Anything from Patricia Highsmith; the obvious pick is The Talented Mister Ripley.

• George V Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle, in my view the greatest heist novel ever written. Indeed, the list is fairly bereft of the new wave of US crime writers that appeared in the seventies: Newton Thornburg, Margaret Miller, Edwin Torres, James Crumley, etc.

No doubt there are as many lists as opinions. Have fun making your own.