I am, as we all are, stuck at home these days. Back in mid-March I assumed I would spend much of my time in lockdown reading — still and always my favorite activity, ideal for an indefinite period of mandatory solitude imposed by, say, a pandemic. This has not been the case. I’ve read fewer books over the past few weeks than I have over any comparable stretch that I can remember. Focus has evaporated. The cognitive load of living through the coronavirus has gone straight for my literary jugular.

Retaining new information or absorbing new stories may be a problem, but one reliable workaround is escaping into much-loved classic crime fiction. These novels, and these authors, helped form my reading sensibility, and I return to them every few years. I loved them first, though, because they were simply damn good books. Revisiting these novels in audio format is a way to acquaint myself anew with the fiendish plots, terrific prose and indelible characters, and to experience a different version of the initial infatuation. And if you’ve never read these works before, how lucky to get to experience those joys for the first time.

When Dorothy L. Sayers first published WHOSE BODY? (Brilliance Audio; 6 hours, 54 minutes) in 1923, she was years away from feeling constrained by the limits of detective fiction, constraints she would push against with masterpieces like “Gaudy Night.” This novel, the first in her series starring the sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, was written as a means of escape — for herself, from her own daily penury, and for a 1920s audience clamoring for diversion from their recent troubles (a world war, a global pandemic, revolutions). Detective fiction offered readers an imaginary, makeshift order: Killing people in fiction was sport and fun.

The discovery of a man’s body in a bathtub, and the subsequent search for his identity, provide the narrative engine for “Whose Body?” But the real pleasure of the novel, conveyed with extra brio by Guy Mott’s brisk and lively narration, is the depiction of Wimsey’s world as enjoyable fantasy, a place for the harried, the stressed and the weary to live somewhere else in their minds.

As Sayers became more disenchanted with what detective fiction had to offer, her fellow crime queen, Agatha Christie, was perfecting and reinventing the genre. By the late 1930s Christie was such a bona fide celebrity her publishers devised an annual marketing campaign, called “A Christie for Christmas,” to accompany the release of each new Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple adventure. But her non-series books also arrived with much fanfare, like the propulsive 1938 mystery MURDER IS EASY, (HarperAudio; 6 hours, 57 minutes), which begins on a London-bound train with a happenstance conversation between Luke Fitzwilliam, returning to England from overseas police work, and Lavinia Pinkerton, who confides that she’s traveling to Scotland Yard to report a serial killer stalking Lavinia’s English village; what’s more, she predicts who the next victim will be. When her prophecy comes true, Luke goes to the village to suss out the culprit. While “Murder Is Easy” is good but not superior Christie — there is, perhaps, one devious twist too many — good Christie still makes for excellent listening, thanks to the voice work of Gemma Whelan, who articulates each character with distinction and carries the narrative forward with gentle aplomb.

Raymond Chandler operated on a track entirely parallel to that of his British-born counterparts. An outsider in the Midwest of his birth and the England of his schooling, the failed oil executive eventually found his voice in writing. Specifically, in pulps like “Black Mask,” where he honed and refined his detective character Philip Marlowe in stories that boiled hard and talked tough. In 1939, THE BIG SLEEP (Audible Studios; 6 hours, 16 minutes) arrived to wide acclaim, as well it should have. Chandler’s evocative prose suffuses this detective story of family secrets, craven lies and mysterious deaths with the romance of the Los Angeles cityscapes he’d fallen in love with — and has by now transmitted to 80 years’ worth of readers.

All of which is why I found myself let down by Ray Porter’s narration. Was that a regional twang I detected, jarring with my innate sense of how Marlowe ought to sound? Never mind that Porter seems to be trying too hard, leaning too far in to the street-smart demeanor when that was always the facade that Chandler hung his work on, barely masking the glorious sentimentality at the heart of his crime fiction.

Chandler and his compatriots Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain embody that American school of hard-boiled fiction that became one of this country’s best-known literary exports. But there was a third stream, not quite cozy, not quite noir, dominated by women, almost entirely rooted around suspense of the psychological variety.

Patricia Highsmith, from the first, had an unerring sense of what drove ordinary people to the most extreme lengths, the result of which was often murder. STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (Blackstone Audio; 9 hours, 41 minutes), her 1950 debut novel, goes far beyond the ingenious, familiar, oft-copied concept — two brand-new acquaintances resolving to do one’s wife in, except one means it and the other doesn’t — to lay bare the roots of miserable marriages, of class differences, of obsessive desires. It’s a strange, nasty fever dream of a book that still has the power to shock 70 years later.

That power comes through in Bronson Pinchot’s narration. His voice conveys the requisite pitch of menace and malice, at once impulsive and premeditated, as well as the sly humor that was a characteristic of so much of Highsmith’s fiction. I’d love to hear Pinchot narrate one of the author’s story collections, too, like “Little Tales of Misogyny.”

While Highsmith concentrated most of her fiction on the ways in which performing masculinity covers up for rage, Margaret Millar mined slightly different psychological terrain. A Canadian transplant in California, Millar began publishing mystery novels long before her husband, Kenneth Millar, did — under the pen name of Ross Macdonald — and at first with more success. (It would take him a while to shed his academic dreams for the commercial success that far eclipsed his wife’s.)

Millar’s mastery of domestic-oriented suspense found full fruition in “Beast in View,” published in the same year (1955) as Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” which Millar’s novel bested for the Edgar Award. BEAST IN VIEW (Audible Studios; 5 hours, 27 minutes) also happens to be my own favorite of Millar’s works (anthologized in the Library of America’s “Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s,” which I edited in 2015). It begins as a moving portrait of Helen Clarvoe, a lonely young woman besieged by harassing phone calls yet disbelieved at every turn. The surprise-twist gear shift, rooted in the inevitable, is like all of Millar’s twists — they shock, but they always, always play fair.

An audiobook narrator has a challenging task in portraying Helen in all of her complexity as she spirals further down into the muck. Jennifer Wydra doesn’t quite meet that challenge, convincing though I found her vocalization of Helen’s internal terror to be. But there is a savagery to the text of “Beast in View,” and to Millar’s crime writing as a whole, that needed more airing. For this one, I’d recommend gulping down the print edition. At barely 160 pages, it won’t take long at all.