Can you have a crime novel where the detective is confined to bed throughout? Why not? Colin Dexter used it in a Morse book (The Wench is Dead), but veteran golden-age author Joesphine Tey did it first in this, her last published novel. Alan Grant (not the one from Jurassic Park, as far as we know) is laid up in hospital with a broken leg. Bored and restless, he decides to try to solve the mystery of the princes in the Tower – was Richard III really the villain the Tudors made him out to be? With the help of various friends and books and paintings, he comes up with his solution.

You should read it because: it’s interesting with the recent finding of Richard’s body; it’s a great study in how to construct a gripping crime story without ever leaving one room or having a body or any living suspects; you want to find out what hospitals were like when they didn’t send you home after an hour with a large pack of paracetamol.

Colin Dexter’s first novel introduces us to the magnetic character of Inspector Morse – drinker, opera buff, brilliant mind, and inexplicable seducer of many women, along with his perplexed sidekick Lewis. The plot revolves around two young women who decide to hitch back to the pretty Oxfordshire village of Woodstock – and one ends up dead. Morse must unravel the web that ties to two women together, all the while drinking ale, doing crosswords, and frowning his way around the Oxford setting that is almost the series’ second lead.

You should read it: to see how to set up a wildly popular series and how to create a character so loved he inspired two spin-off TV shows; to admire the spare, ironic prose; to see how to use setting with enormous effect.

Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 thriller helped create the modern action thriller, a genre that sells millions each year and often features hitmen, conspiracies, high-level plots and a race against time. This is based around a real-life attempt on the life of General de Gaulle, which segues into a fictional follow-up plot. It opens with a famously ‘hooky’ passage of a man facing a firing squad and keeps up the pace with an unnamed English assasin, ‘The Jackal’, being hunted by French detective Lebel. A race is soon on to stop the General being killed.

You should read it because: Forsyth, an investigative journalist by trade, used the same methods to build up an intense sense of realism, and slotted his novel around real-life events to increase the tension and plausibility. It’s also a classic dual baddy/goody narrative. Although beware the power of the novel – it was an inspiration for the assassin who killed Yitzhak Rabin, and the man who tried to kill George Bush in 2005 – and also gave Carlos the Jackal his nickname.

Christine wakes up every day in a strange bed, with a man she doesn’t know. When she looks in the mirror, she sees a middle-aged woman she doesn’t recognise. A rare condition means that every time she goes to sleep she loses herself again. Gradually, with the help of a doctor and her ongoing diary, she manages to piece together bits of her past. Why has she found a picture of herself pregnant – and where is her child? Who did she used to be? And why has she found a note from herself, telling her not to trust her husband?

You should read it because: this huge bestseller caught the public imagination with its intriguing premise, and is a supreme example of how to use narration to cloak things from the reader. In this case the narrator is made unreliable by simply not remembering, but yours could also be lying, or traumatised, or unable to tell us the truth for other reasons. Arguably the book launched the current ‘marriage thriller’ genre that is so popular (see also Gone Girl) and is soon to be a major film with Nicole Kidman.