Ask ten readers for the best British crime series and you will get ten answers, most of them delivered with unnecessary force. The genre runs from gentle Norfolk mysteries to Glasgow novels that leave a bruise. The sensible way in is not to chase the bestseller tables but to match a region and a tone to what you already enjoy, then commit to one series rather than sampling six. Here is where to begin.

Pick the mood before the map

Before you choose a detective, choose a mood. Three questions are worth asking yourself.

• Comfort or grit? Do you want a puzzle you can solve on the sofa, or something closer to a bruise?
• Place or plot? Some series are really novels about a town that happen to contain a murder. Others are clockwork mysteries with a setting attached.
• One case or a long story? A few detectives barely change across twenty books. Others age, marry, get promoted and grieve.

One rule of thumb: read the first book, not the newest. Debuts do the work of introducing a detective's world, and even a slightly rough first novel tells you whether you want twenty more like it.

London: eccentric, crowded, quietly strange

Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May series opens with Full Dark House, which begins with a bomb in a London office and then slips back to the Blitz. The Peculiar Crimes Unit handles the cases nobody else wants, and its two detectives are elderly, bickering and genuinely delightful. If you like your crime fiction with jokes and an interest in the city's odd corners, start here.

For something straighter, Robert Galbraith's Cormoran Strike novels begin with The Cuckoo's Calling: a private detective with a prosthetic leg, a temporary secretary called Robin, and a celebrity death that may not be what it looks like. The books are long, atmospheric and very easy to keep reading. Anthony Horowitz's The Word Is Murder takes a different route, putting the author himself in the story as a reluctant sidekick to a prickly ex-detective named Daniel Hawthorne. It could be unbearably clever; it is not, because Horowitz knows exactly when to stop showing off.

Villages, marshes and the clever-cosy tradition

Elly Griffiths's Ruth Galloway books start with The Crossing Places. Ruth is a forensic archaeologist in Norfolk who is happiest up to her knees in mud, and the mix of saltmarsh, missing children and dry humour is a fine introduction to what British crime does well. The central relationship develops slowly across the series, which is part of the pleasure rather than a delay.

Ann Cleeves's Vera Stanhope series opens with The Crow Trap, set in the Northumberland hills. Vera is untidy, blunt and brilliant. The debut is built in three parts, each with a different narrator, so give it a couple of chapters before you decide. Anyone who has watched the television version will recognise the voice on the page immediately.

Yorkshire and the north: granite, rain and proper police work

Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series begins with Gallows View. It is a village novel with a solid procedural underneath — a peeping tom, a burglar, a killing — and it sets up a character who grows and changes over the decades that follow. If you like a series that ages in real time, this is one of the most rewarding.

Val McDermid's Tony Hill and Carol Jordan novels start with The Mermaids Singing: a forensic psychologist and a detective hunting a killer in a fictional northern city. It is considerably darker than anything above, with violence that is graphic rather than implied, so approach it in the right mood. Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie books, beginning with Case Histories, sit somewhere else again — sad, funny, structurally playful, and closer to literary fiction with a mystery engine under the bonnet.

Scotland: the tartan noir shelf

Ian Rankin's John Rebus is the obvious starting point, and unusually for a long series, the first book is not automatically the best place to begin. Knots and Crosses is a leaner, stranger thriller than what follows; plenty of readers start with Black and Blue, where the series settles into its mature voice. Either works, as long as you accept that Rebus improves as he gets grumpier.

For more bite, try William McIlvanney's Laidlaw, set in 1970s Glasgow. It reads like a novel rather than a puzzle, and it is the book most often credited with making tartan noir possible. Denise Mina's Garnethill is the other essential Glasgow debut: a woman investigates a murder the police would rather she left alone, and the book manages to be angry and humane on the same page.

Wales and the West Country: the quieter edges

Harry Bingham's Fiona Griffiths series opens with Talking to the Dead, a Cardiff police procedural carried by one of the most distinctive narrators in modern British crime. Fiona is odd, funny and not always reliable, and her voice is the reason to keep going.

Ann Cleeves's Two Rivers series begins with The Long Call in North Devon — a gentler book than the Shetland novels, with a detective who has left the church for the police. Good for readers who want community and coastline rather than blood.

How to start without buying thirty paperbacks

1. Choose one series and read its first book. Resist the urge to line up six detectives at once; they blur together.
2. Give it fifty pages. If nothing has caught by then, put it down. A mismatch with a narrator is not a failure of taste.
3. Use the library first. Nearly everything here is in paperback and most libraries stock it. Charity shops are excellent for filling gaps in a long series.
4. Note the order, but do not obey it slavishly. Crime series are usually written to be read in sequence, yet the good ones can survive being read out of order. Just avoid starting with a book that resolves the disappearance from the previous one.
5. Alternate. Read a gritty novel, then a gentler one. It keeps the darker end of the genre enjoyable rather than exhausting.

If you want a single recommendation: The Crossing Places for comfort, Laidlaw for grit, and The Cuckoo's Calling if you would rather have a long, richly plotted book to sink into this weekend. Whichever you pick, start with the first one — and expect to be hunting the second by Sunday night.

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