Late to today's party and most of my really big favorites have already made an appearance in other folks' posts, so I figured I'll just list mine and showcase at the top of my post some of the books that haven't yet been highlighted by others.  By bingo category, with suspense and mysteries together in one block and an extra block for the children's books instead:

MYSTERIES / SUSPENSE

Dorothy L. Sayers: Lord Peter Wimsey series, especially the Wimsey & Vane subseries / quartet

Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes series
Agatha Christie: Poirot, Miss Marple and Tommy & Tuppence series, The Witness for the Prosecution, The Mousetrap, And Then There Were None, Crooked House, Towards Zero, The Sittaford Mystery
Patricia Wentworth: Miss Silver series
Ngaio Marsh: Roderick Alleyn series
Josephine Tey: Brat Farrar, The Daughter of Time, The Franchise Affair
John Dickson Carr: The Hollow Man
Anthony Wynne: Murder of a Lady
Mavis Doriel Hay: The Santa Klaus Murder
Georgette Heyer: Envious Casca
Robert van Gulik: Judge Dee series
Georges Simenon: Maigret series
Graham Greene: The Third Man
John Mortimer: Rumpole series
Ruth Rendell: Inspector Wexford series
P.D. James: Inspector Dalgliesh series
Dennis Wheatley: Who Killed Robert Prentice?
Q. Patrick: File on Fenton and Farr
Mary Roberts Rinehart: Locked Doors
Rex Stout: Nero Wolfe series
Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley
Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep
Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon
Cornell Woolrich: Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black
James M. Cain: Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice
John Dudley Ball: In the Heat of the Night
Mario Puzo: The Godfather
Neil Simon, H.R.F. Keating: Murder by Death

SUPERNATURAL (FANTASY, SCIENCE FICTION), DYSTOPIA
William Shakespeare: The Tempest
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings
C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale
George Orwell: 1984
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Sheri S. Tepper: The True Game
Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Lady of Shalott

GOTHIC & HORROR
William Shakespeare: Macbeth
Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
Anne Brontë: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Daphne Du Maurier: Rebecca
Christina Rossetti: Goblin Market
Charles Dickens: Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, The Signalman
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Canterville Ghost
Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone
Theodor Storm: Der Schimmelreiter (The Dykemaster)
Edith Wharton: Ghost Stories
Edgar Allan Poe: The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Raven, The Mask of the Red Death
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw
Shirley Jackson: The Lottery, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

CHILDREN'S BOOKS
Otfried Preußler: The Little Witch, The Little Ghost
Robert Arthur, et al.: The Three Investigators series
T.H. White: The Sword in the Stone
Wilhelm Hauff: Fairy Tales

Brat has finally been asking himself the question that I´ve been asking myself for quite some time now:

Uhm, does anyone know in which time period this is set in? This novel has been published in 1949, but the gaslightning in the street of London kind of threw me off. That plus the fact that whole story feels like it is set in the 1920s.

I have read the short Tey biography in the front of my edition, so I know that she has written this book way before the actual publication date. 

‘Come and see me again before you decide anything,’ the Rector had said; but he had at least been helpful in one direction. He had answered Brat’s main question. If it was a choice between love and justice, the choice had to be justice.

Brat Farrar (written in 1949) was not a perfect read. I have had issues with the some of the reactions of the characters, and I believe some of the timing of the story is off, too.

The story is set in post-WWII Britain, which puts some of the story at a time during the height of WWII. I'm not disputing that this is possible, but Tey doesn't mention anything about the ongoing war when relating those parts of the story - and this is not typical for Tey whose main character in another series, Allan Grant, suffers from PTSD after WWI.  

What it does read like is a story that was originally drafted in the 1930s and then was revised for publication in 1949...except that some of the historical facts were silenced.

However, the story itself was really interesting: it's not the usual whodunit. We know from the start that Brat Farrar is an impostor. What we don't know is what happened to the character that he is trying to pass off as. This is revealed very slowly while were waiting to see if any of the Ashby family recognise Brat as a fraud.

I loved that concept. 

I also loved the way that Brat introduces himself to the villain of the piece:

‘I suppose you wouldn’t like, in return for my confidences, to tell me something?’

‘Tell you what?’

‘Who you are?’

Brat sat looking at him for a long time. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’ he said.

‘No. Who are you?’

‘Retribution,’ said Brat, and finished his drink.

You see, I was tickled by the coincidence that Agatha Christie pursued a similar line in her book Nemesis (with Miss Marple playing the part of Nemesis). Nemesis being the name for the goddess of retribution. 

There are no connections or similarities between Tey's and Christie's books other than the reference to mythology, but I liked that both authors picked up on the same theme.

‘Funny,’ he said, as Brat plunged the shoe into the water, ‘if any Ashby was to earn his living at this job it ought to have been your brother.’

‘Why?’

‘You never showed much interest.’

‘And did Simon?’

‘There was a time when I couldn’t keep him out of this place. There wasn’t anything he wasn’t going to make, from a candlestick to gates for the avenue at Latchetts. Far as I remember, all he ever made was a sheep-crook, and that not over-well. But he was always round the place. It was a craze of his for the whole of a summer.’

‘Which summer was that?’

‘Summer you left us, it was. I’d misremember about it, only he was here seeing us put an iron on a cartwheel the day you ran away. I had to shoo him home for his supper.’

I suppose the last line was the author saving a discrepancy here. I just can't get my head around that "Patrick", i.e. Brat, has only been gone for 7 years but people seem to allow for him forgetting an awful lot about his life before that. It does not add up. 

Also, Simon is very suspicious and I would have expected him to be able to tell if Brat is his brother or not. It's not like they were separated at a young age.

And why does no-one ask Simon why he thinks that Brat isn't/couldn't be his brother when he first hears about him?