Who doesn’t love a nice juicy crime yarn? A body in a library; a diamond purloined from a locked vault; poison pen letters in a sleepy English village. There’s something deliciously British about novels exploring the darker side of life. And that’s why the Twenties and Thirties were the ‘Golden Age’ of British crime writing.

Back then, bookshops were full of works by Dorothy L Sayers, who created gentleman sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey; Ngaio Marsh, who gave us Inspector Alleyn; and Agatha Christie herself. These stories gripping tales were the inspiration behind my new novel The Waterfall, with its plethora of gothic priories, formidable sleuths and thrilling twists.

They also helped inspire my new choose-your-own adventure book, Murder At Christmas. So close the curtains, plump up your pillow, watch out for cyanide in your cocoa and crack open one of these, the five best stories from the greatest era of crime fiction.

• The choose-your-own-adventure style book Murder At Christmas: You Solve the Crime, by G.B. Rubin, is published by Simon & Schuster priced £16.99, and out now

Nemesis by Agatha Christie

Miss Marple was only ever supposed to be a side-project when Christie got tired with Poirot. But here the little old lady with a brain like a man-trap, shows off her skills to the greatest. It’s the last Marple novel Christie wrote, and one of her very best. Our heroine is drafted in by the dying tycoon Jason Rafiel to clear the name of his estranged son, a young tearaway who was wrongly convicted of a nasty little crime a long time ago. The story stays with you not just because of the slightly wacky set-up, in which Miss M is sent on a coach tour of country houses by Rafiel, along with various suspects and characters connected to the old crime. St Mary Mead’s great sleuth is getting old and frail, but her mind is active as ever.

Soon, the old crime and another that might be part of the picture rear their ugly heads. But the perpetrators of those horrid deeds has – like everyone else who meets her – underestimated Miss Marple. The solution is a sad one, even though the killer suffers a type of justice. It’s really about how love can be twisted, and, at the end, everyone has lost what they want more than anything.

The Tiger In The Smoke by Margery Allingham

It’s funny to think that Albert Campion, Allingham’s hero of many books, started as a parody of Lord Peter Wimsey. So in the early novels, he’s a slightly silly aristocrat apparently related to the Royal Family, but he becomes more serious as the years and the series goes on. The Tiger In The Smoke is a perfect example of things going from sunny country houses to mean, dark streets.

Set in 1952, in a smoggy post-war London where everyone has lost someone in the war, the book is a little unusual in the genre, because the storyline begins with a straightforward mystery – the possible reappearance of a soldier believed killed during the War – but soon becomes a gangland thriller, with loan sharks, mob warfare and a mounting pile of bodies.

The influence of American Hardboiled detective fiction is tangible, not least in the fact that at the heart of the crime is a priceless piece of art a la Maltese Falcon. Maybe the grit why Campion’s role in all of this is a bit subdued – he works hand-in-glove with Inspector Luke of Scotland Yard, so the full force of the Metropolitan Police is breathing down the gangsters’ necks, rather than the effete toff taking them on with no more than a family crest and a few sardonic one-liners.

A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh

Chief Inspector Alleyn is another gentleman detective, but he’s a copper too – presumably the only constable on the beat who went to Eton. This is his first appearance, and it’s a quintessential country house affair, during which a ‘murder game’ – a popular pursuit for the idle rich back then – turns out to be heavy on the ‘murder’ and light on the ‘game’. So we’re all invited to Sir Hubert Handesley’s country house for the weekend. But we won’t all survive it.

In the game, one of the party is the murderer and has a day in which to tap his or her victim on the shoulder to knock them off. They then ring the dinner gong and have a two-minute head start to scarper and establish an alibi. But when the gong sounds and everyone assembles, there’s a real corpse to contend with: writer and ladies’ man Charles Rankin. But just who of the seven suspects would stab him to death as a means to ending the sport? It seems a bit severe.

There are spiffing sub-plots aplenty, including Communists, a secret Russian brotherhood, and the usual flirtations. The final solution to just how the dagger ended up in Rankin’s back is a bit ludicrous – and Marsh later said that she cringed at just how ludicrous it all is – but it has to be taken as a bit of fun, not gritty realism.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers

When Sayers created Lord Peter Wimsey and his valet, Bunter, she took the gentleman detective recipe and stirred in a more than a dash of Jeeves and Wooster. The result is a very pretty mix of crime and comedy. The crimes they encounter are rarely as inventive or grim as those encountered by Poirot and Hastings, but the tongue-in-cheek charm of the characters and lightness of Sayers’s touch make them every bit as readable.

In this tale, Wimsey’s most-celebrated outing, the setting is a fusty Oxford college, where a series of malicious anonymous letters and graffiti have upset the dons and Wimsey’s love interest, Harriet Vane, who has returned to her alma mater for a celebration. Harriet first met Wimsey when she was accused of murder in a previous book, Strong Poison, and the shadow of that accusation still hangs over her.

Things escalate into violence, and Harriet herself is attacked. She calls on Wimsey for aid and he swings into louche action. The clue that gives away the criminal is memorable for its simplicity but effectiveness. Like all the best solutions, it was hiding in plain sight. And it’s the start of the romance between Harriet and Wimsey – something Miss Marple never had.

The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr

Dickson Carr’s masterpiece is a notable oddity. It’s another outing for his corpulent amateur sleuth Gideon Fell, a fun character, slapped onto the page, instead of delicately drawn. 

Fell is usually called upon to solve locked-room mysteries and other ‘impossible crimes’. This one is no different: a man is killed and his assassin vanished into thin air. So far, so normal. But then, halfway through the book, things get a bit bonkers. 

Fell, a little frustrated with being trotted out in book after book, ‘breaks the third wall’ and speaks directly to the reader, admitting that he’s a character in a detective novel. And more than that, he delivers a brief lecture on the various ways that someone can be murdered in a locked room (a trick chair, whereby a heavy weight flips out of the back of the chair and clobbers whoever sits down into it is my favourite, so just look out for that in my next novel), after which he reverts back to his usual job and sets about solving the mystery. It’s a curious, but diverting little meander. It’s only a pity that the solution to the overall mystery in this case is quite implausible. Buckets of charm, though.