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Books by John Lawton and Complete Book Reviews

• The Name Is Troy. Freddie Troy.
• A Cockney Spy: PW Talks with John Lawton

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John Lawton Books In Order

Publication order of inspector troy books.

Chronological Order of Inspector Troy Books

Publication Order of Joe Wilderness Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

John Lawton is basically an author of the crime genre novels. He has written a series of successful novels set in England during the time of World War II and Cold War. His novel series ‘Troy’ features historical depictions and espionage. John is also a director and producer of television shows. Lawton was born in the year 1949 in England. He had a brief career as a publisher in London after which he became a television producer at a newly opened channel in London during the mid-1980’s. Lawton went and settled in New York in the year 1993 where he completed his novel ‘Black Out’. He was awarded the WH Smith award for that book in 1995. After that, he went back to England and started producing television shows up to 1999. In 2001, he returned with a show titled ‘Riptide’ which was made by Columbia Pictures. He has constantly changed his residence from USA, England and Italy. He was listed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the ’50 Crime Writers To Read Before You Die’. Since then, he has read novels in many places such as Toronto, Ottawa, Seattle and Portland and in the year 2010, he was named in the New York Times Review’s ‘Pick of the Year’ for one of his novels. Lawton had developed hobbies such as cultivation of onions and varieties of potatoes. He also liked to grow leeks. Lawton’s close friends describe him as seriously engrossed in whatever he did.

Lawton has worked with many notable people of his time such as Neil Simon and Noam Chomsky. He is the only director to be named in the parliamentary Bill as an offender against taste and balance in the British House of Lords. He has also been denounced as a Communist from the pulpit in Mississippi. He has attended a number of writers’ associations throughout the 90’s and has spent his life working in more the half of the 50 states. Lawton has lived in the wet and high hills of Derbyshire, since 2000 with frequent visits to the hills of Arizona and Italy. He has written many notable books and novel series’ such as the Troy series, Sweet Sunday and 1963,which was an extract from the historical and political life of Kennedy and Macmillan. Lawton novels have featured in the New York Times and have been made into television shows. He has also edited the stories of Joseph Conrad and the poetry of DH Lawrence. Lawton is devoted to the works of Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Gowdy, Franz Schubert and Art Tatum.

The crime novel series ‘Troy’ has fetched great name and fame for Lawton. He described the character of the protagonist Frederick Troy in this series. Frederick is a kind of character who does not like to be called by names other than his surname, Troy. Troy is depicted as the younger son of a Russian immigrant. His father becomes a rich newspaper publisher and a baronet. In spite of being rich and having all the luxuries of life, Troy defies the expectations of his family and joins the Scotland Yard. He becomes an investigator in a murder’ squad department’. The rights of the character of Troy were purchased by Columbia Pictures, who made television shows based on the storylines of the books written by John Lawton. The Troy series featured seven different novels full of thrill and excitement. The first novel was titled ‘Black Out’ and was published in the year 1995 by Viking. It was the debut novel of Lawton and was reissued recently by Grove Press. The novel is an exciting wartime thriller with stunning action scenes. The excellent storyline of the novel helped Lawton to cement his place in the list of greatest crime writers of his time. It significantly captures the realities of London during the war times. He has penned down a riveting drama in this novel encapsulating the uncertainty of Europe at the start of the postwar era.

During the war times of 1944, the Luftwaffe is making assaults on the capital of Britain and the people of London are forced to run for their lives taking shelter in anything that they can. The Blacked out city begins to face other troubles when the panic subsides. A group of children discover a severed arm while playing near a bomb site. Detective Troy tries to investigate the discovery of the arm and is successful in linking the severed arm to the vanishing of a refugee scientist from Nazi Germany. The new intelligence agency of America, the OSS gets involved in the matter. Troy comes from a high class lifestyle, but he is forced to leave London to investigate refugees and mysterious women in order to find the chain of secrets. The novel brings out the elegance and style of Detective Troy and its suspenseful plot makes this novel a fine thriller. It fetched an award for Lawton in the crime genre and boosted his career as a novelist. The second novel of the series was published in the year 1996 by Viking and then by Grove Press. It was titled ‘Old Flames’ and depicted the Cold War phase of 1956 England.

During this time, the members of the Soviet Union are on an official visit to Britain. Troy is assigned to the job of protection of Khrushchev and Bulganin. Troy finds out the body of a Royal Navy diver and begins to investigate his death. He tries to link all the instances that have happened before him and starts suspecting Khrushchev for some kind of plotting against England. During the course of his investigation, he comes across an old flame Larissa Tosca, who is an ex-army officer from U.S and is currently serving Khrushchev. The dead body of the diver is suspected to be of a furniture salesman named Arnold Cockerell or he might have faked his own death. Several murders take place wherever Troy goes for investigation and he begins to think of Cockerell as an agent or a spy. As his mystery deepens, Troy gets closer to solving the case and bring the culprits to trial. The novel was appreciated as a thrilling adventure of suspense and intrigue. Noted writes considered it to be brilliantly presented by Lawton. It was believed to be full of marvelous thoughts and moments. Readers liked the rich mixture of old-fashioned mayhem and political intrigue.

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Reviews of Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton

Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

Then We Take Berlin

• BookBrowse Review:
• Critics' Consensus:
• Readers' Rating:
• First Published:
• Sep 3, 2013, 400 pages
• Nov 2014, 432 pages

• Historical Fiction
• Mid-Atlantic, USA
• New York State
• UK (Britain) & Ireland
• 1940s & '50s
• 1st in Series
• War Related
• Publication Information
• Write a Review
• Buy This Book

About This Book

Book summary.

A gripping, meticulously researched and richly detailed historical thriller - a moving story of espionage and war, and people caught up in the most tumultuous events of the twenty-first century.

Joe Wilderness is a World War II orphan, a condition that he thinks excuses him from common morality. Cat burglar, card sharp, and Cockney wide boy, the last thing he wants is to get drafted. But in 1946 he finds himself in the Royal Air Force, facing a stretch in military prison... when along comes Lt Colonel Burne-Jones to tell him MI6 has better use for his talents. Posted to occupied Berlin, interrogating ex-Nazis, and burgling the odd apartment for MI6, Wilderness finds himself with time on his hands and the devil making work. He falls in with Frank, a US Army captain, with Eddie, a British artilleryman and with Yuri, a major in the NKVD and together they lift the black market scam to a new level. Coffee never tasted so sweet. And he falls for Nell Breakheart, a German girl who has witnessed the worst that Germany could do and is driven by all the scruples that Wilderness lacks. Fifteen years later, June 1963. Wilderness is free-lance and down on his luck. A gumshoe scraping by on divorce cases. Frank is a big shot on Madison Avenue, cooking up one last Berlin scam ... for which he needs Wilderness once more. Only now they're not smuggling coffee, they're smuggling people. And Nell? Nell is on the staff of West Berlin's mayor Willy Brandt, planning for the state visit of the most powerful man in the world: "Ich bin ein Berliner!" Then We Take Berlin is a gripping, meticulously researched and richly detailed historical thriller – a moving story of espionage and war, and people caught up in the most tumultuous events of the twenty-first century.

He'd never flown the Atlantic before. He'd flown plenty of times. His years in the RAF had seen to that. He'd scrounged flights almost like hitching car rides. But he'd never done a long haul. It was the stuff of Sunday colour supplement advertising. "International" was a positive in the adman's world. It implied you were beyond the pettiness of nations, that you were post post-war, that you moved in a world peopled by the likes of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, that you sat in the VIP lounge at airports, and had a bag emblazoned with the name of the airline. Things like that were coveted. It was chic to be seen with a cheap plastic holdall marked BOAC, chic-er still to be seen with the one Wilderness now had bearing the Pan Am logo. Frank hadn't been mean with him. Whatever Frank's faults—lies, tricks, half-truths, cheapness was not one of them. First class all the way. The hostess handed him a package as soon as he took his ...

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Have you ever come late to a party thinking you missed most of the fun, only find out that the best was yet to come? Well, I seem to have come late to John Lawton’s party because this is the first book of his that I’ve read. And it is so good that I will now pick up his previous seven (Frederick Troy) books. What’s more, I look forward to his next book about John Wilfred Holderness, aka Wilderness, aka Joe... continued

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(Reviewed by Donna Chavez ).

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The post world war ii german black market.

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Read-Alikes

• Genres & Themes

If you liked Then We Take Berlin, try these:

The Berlin Exchange

by Joseph Kanon

Published 2023

About this book

More by this author

From "master of the genre" (the Washington Post ) Joseph Kanon, an espionage thriller set at the height of the Cold War, when a captured American who has spied for the KGB is swapped by the British and returns to East Berlin needing to know who arranged his release and what they want from him.

City of Secrets

by Stewart O'Nan

Published 2017

From master storyteller Stewart O'Nan, a timely moral thriller of the Jewish underground resistance in Jerusalem after the Second World War

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Book Review: Hammer to Fall by John Lawton

By janet webb.

Hammer to Fall

John lawton.

Joe Wilderness series

March 10, 2020

The third Joe Wilderness spy thriller from John Lawton, set in the swinging sixties, takes rogue MI6 Agent Joe Wilderness from Finland to Prague on a vodka-soaked adventure.

What happens to spies after peace treaties are signed? According to Hammer to Fall , they simply keep on keeping on. Books about spy-craft (fiction and non-fiction) reveal spies have more affinity with their counterparts across the ideological divide than with their masters in the sterile corridors of power. 

Joe “Wilderness” Holderness has a well-earned reputation for going rogue, particularly when he’s bored. We catch a glimpse of him in East Berlin, in the summer of 1948, “trading coffee, butter and anything else the Russians had on their shopping list.” Through the prism of Wilderness’s black market activities, clues are dropped about his nature and future. Wilderness is not your standard Kim Philby-like, Oxbridge spy; “raised by thieves and whores back in London’s East End, he had come to regard honesty as aberrant.” Lying is second nature to Wilderness, as it would be to any “good S chieber .” It’s hard to exactly translate Schieber into English but a few synonyms are pusher, dealer, racketeer, gangster. You get the drift. In Wilderness’s world, “You lied and you were lied to.”

His “Elsa” is Nell Burkhardt, a woman so honorable that although Wilderness can supply her with delicious black-market delicacies, she refuses to prepare anything beyond the fare of ordinary Berliners. Nell is the one-that-got-away—surprising Wilderness when she walks out on him. 

Even more of a surprise was that he would not set eyes on her again for fifteen years, that the 1950s would roll into the 1960s without a glimpse of her.

Years later, a married man and father of twins, a whiff of L’aimant by Coty, Nell’s signature scent, transports Wilderness to an unforgettable time.

Wilderness mucks up what should have been a pro forma transfer of spies on the Glienicke Bridge. He returns to London town to face the music. No one in Whitehall believes his explanation so his father-in-law/boss arranges a new assignment in Finland, reporting to Head of Station, Burton, J. The unspoken reason for Wilderness’s exile transfer is that MI6 doesn’t want him to answer any more questions from disapproving politicians. 

“What’s past is prologue” is an unspoken theme of Hammer to Fall . Fifteen years after Nell gave him his marching orders, Wilderness makes a quick detour to Berlin, on his way to Finland.

Memory was a flood he could not fold. So he accepted it. Every time he went back to Grünetümmlerstraße he knew he would be drenched by wave and wave of memories, mostly of Nell Burkhardt.

Nell is long gone but their friend Erno Schreiber, a talented document forger, tells Wilderness that Nell is quite a powerhouse now. Wilderness is taken aback to hear she’s destined for Bonn; she was always a Berliner to her core.

Helsinki is much as Wilderness remembers, a city grounded in the past, with cobblestones and trams: “He’d never found much to like or dislike about the place. Hardly a recommendation.” Given his new identity as Michael Young, Second Secretary/cultural attaché, Wilderness anticipates “doing nothing, saying nothing.” Of course he’s wrong. He goes to the chancery and asks a “woman in her late forties” if he can see the boss. After a long while, she ushers him into an empty room, saying “Mr. Burton will see you now.”

“Do sit down, Flight Sergeant Holderness. You’re only Michael Young when I’m through with you.”   Burton . . . Burton . . . Burton, J. Oh fuck. Jenny Burton from the Bonn Station a couple of years back. The one they called the Brocken Witch.    “I’m surprised we haven’t met before, but Bonn was never your stamping ground, was it?”   Wilderness sat.   “Berlin,” he said simply.   “And your reputation in Berlin precedes you. In fact, I’m amazed the things you got up to in Berlin last year didn’t sink you. But . . . that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Alec wants you out of the way.”   Wilderness said nothing. If she was going to prattle on about his reputation, he’d neither defend nor agree.   “Let’s get one thing straight from the start, shall we? You won’t be playing Cowboys and Indians on my turf. You won’t be pulling any stunts like the one you staged at Invalidenstraße. You’re a cultural attaché.”

John Lawton infuses Hammer to Fall with ironic, dispassionate humor, never more so than Wilderness’s cover story. He’s supposed to promote British films by hosting movie nights in tiny villages dotted around the Finnish countryside. His current repertoire is unimpressive, ranging from The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) to Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949): “all marvellous . . . in their way . . . in their time . . .  but this wasn’t their time . . . this was 1966. London was swinging.” In his sturdy beast of a car, referred to as the Mog, Wilderness comes up with a list that includes This Sporting Life , Darling , and A Hard Day’s Night . He considers The Spy Who Came in from the Cold but that’s a bridge too far. He’s quite disappointed when Darling (an Oscar winner) goes “down like a lead balloon.”

“Ya know what I like. A good, smutty comedy. Women with big tits. The odd knob joke. How about a Carry On ? Saw a cracker the last time I was in London. Carry on Cabby . Sid James. Do they come any better than Sid James?”

So much for “arty farty stuff.” Wilderness’s nemesis—boredom—kicks in. There’s “nothing to spy on,” so perhaps he should get sloshed. Momo, a new acquaintance, tells him to sit down.

Then he splashed something as transparent as Wilderness’s cover into the glasses and handed them out. Pastorius got the plastic cup.  “Bottoms up.” Bruce spoke first. “This is good stuff. Not sure we’ve ever landed better.” “Vodka?” said Wilderness. “That’d be one name for it, but it’s got dozens. Kilju . . . pontikku . . . ponantza . . . tuliliemi . . .” “Moonshine?” “Yep.”

So what does Wilderness decide to do? It’s along the lines of selling snow to the Eskimos. He decides to smuggle “vodka across the rather porous border into the USSR.” A couple of successful runs later, “his old KGB pal Kostya” shows up. This is a good place to leave Wilderness but suffice to say, he won’t be in the Finnish wilderness for long—MI6 back in London tells him a “critical component in the casing of the atomic bomb” is being mined in the area. Wilderness is a lightning rod for trouble and danger—and his sardonic, deadpan approach to life’s vicissitudes adds to the pleasure of reading Hammer to Fall .

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Hammer to Fall (The Joe Wilderness Novels, 3) Hardcover – March 10, 2020

The third Joe Wilderness spy thriller from a master of the genre, moving from icy Finland to tumultuous Cold War Prague, Hammer to Fall is a tale of vodka smuggling and a legendary female Red Army general who is playing a dangerous game

It’s London, the swinging sixties, and by all rights MI6 spy Joe Wilderness should be having as good a time as James Bond. But alas, his postings are more grim than glamorous. Luckily, Wilderness has a knack for doing well for himself even in the most unpromising postings, though this has gotten him into hot water in the past. A coffee-smuggling gig in divided Berlin was a steady money-maker but things went pear-shaped when he had to smuggle a spy back to the KGB instead. In the wake of what became an embarrassing disaster for MI6, Wilderness is reprimanded with a posting to remote northern Finland, under the guise of a cultural exchange program to promote Britain abroad. Bored by his work, with nothing to spy on, Wilderness finds another way to make money, this time by smuggling vodka across the rather porous border into the USSR. He strikes a deal with his old KGB pal Kostya, who explains to him there is, no joke, a vodka shortage in the Soviet Union, following a grain famine caused by Khrushchev’s new agricultural policies. But there is something fishy about why Kostya has suddenly turned up in Finland―and MI6 intelligence from London points to a connection to the mining of cobalt in the region, a critical component in the casing of the atomic bomb. Wilderness’s posting is getting more interesting by the minute, but more dangerous too.

Moving from the no-man’s-land of Cold War Finland to the wild days of the Prague Spring, and populated by old friends (including Inspector Troy) and old enemies alike, Hammer to Fall is a gripping tale of deception and skullduggery, of art and politics, a page-turning story of the always riveting life of the British spy.

• Book 3 of 4 The Joe Wilderness Novels
• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date March 10, 2020
• Dimensions 6.25 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0802148123
• ISBN-13 978-0802148124
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

“Lawton’s books contain such a wealth of period detail, character depiction, and background information that they are lifted out of any category. Every word is enriched by the author’s sophistication and irreverent intelligence, by his meticulous research and his wit.” ― Literary Review

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atlantic Monthly Press; First Edition (March 10, 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0802148123
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0802148124
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
• #4,136 in Historical British & Irish Literature
• #10,055 in Historical Thrillers (Books)
• #54,341 in Suspense Thrillers

About the author

John lawton.

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Americans are ‘getting whacked’ by too many laws and regulations, Justice Gorsuch says in a new book

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch poses for a portrait in his office at the Supreme Court, Monday, July 29, 2024, in Washington. Gorsuch is out with a new book in which he says ordinary Americans are “getting whacked” by too many laws and regulations. “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law” is being published on Tuesday, Aug. 6. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Ordinary Americans are “getting whacked” by too many laws and regulations, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch says in a new book that underscores his skepticism of federal agencies and the power they wield.

“Too little law and we’re not safe, and our liberties aren’t protected,” Gorsuch told The Associated Press in an interview in his Supreme Court office. “But too much law and you actually impair those same things.”

“Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law” is being published Tuesday by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Gorsuch has received a $500,000 advance for the book, according to his annual financial disclosure reports.

In the interview, Gorsuch refused to be drawn into discussions about term limits or an enforceable code of ethics for the justices, both recently proposed by President Joe Biden at a time of diminished public trust in the court. Justice Elena Kagan, speaking a couple of days before Biden, separately said the court’s ethics code, adopted by the justices last November, should have a means of enforcement .

But Gorsuch did talk about the importance of judicial independence. “I’m not saying that there aren’t ways to improve what we have. I’m simply saying that we’ve been given something very special. It’s the envy of the world, the United States judiciary,” he said.

The 56-year-old justice was the first of three Supreme Court nominees of then-President Donald Trump, and they have combined to entrench a conservative majority that has overturned Roe v. Wade, ended affirmative action in college admissions, expanded gun rights and clipped environmental regulations aimed at climate change, as well as air and water pollution more generally.

A month ago, the Supreme Court completed a term in which Gorsuch and the court’s five other conservative justices delivered sharp rebukes to the administrative state in three major cases, including the decision that overturned the 40-year-old Chevron decision that had made it more likely that courts would sustain regulations. The court’s three liberal justices dissented each time.

Gorsuch also was in the majority in ruling that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution in a decision that indefinitely delayed the election interference case against Trump. What’s more, the justices made it harder to use a federal obstruction charge against people who were part of the mob that violently attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to overturn Trump’s defeat by Biden in the 2020 election.

Gorsuch defended the immunity ruling as necessary to prevent presidents from being hampered while in office by threats of prosecution once they leave.

The court had to wrestle with an unprecedented situation, he said. “Here we have, for the first time in our history, one presidential administration bringing criminal charges against a prior president. It’s a grave question, right? Grave implications,” Gorsuch said.

But in the book, co-authored by a former law clerk, Janie Nitze, Gorusch largely sets those big issues aside and turns his focus to a fisherman, a magician, Amish farmers, immigrants, a hair braider and others who risked jail time, large fines, deportation and other hardships over unyielding rules.

In 18 years as a judge, including the past seven on the Supreme Court, Gorsuch said, “There were just so many cases that came to me in which I saw ordinary Americans, just everyday, regular people trying to go about their lives, not trying to hurt anybody or do anything wrong and just getting whacked, unexpectedly, by some legal rule they didn’t know about.”

The problem, he said, is that there has been an explosion of laws and regulations, at both the federal and state levels. The sheer volume of Congress’ output for the past decade is overwhelming, he said, averaging 344 pieces of legislation totaling 2 million to 3 million words a year.

One vignette involves John Yates, a Florida fisherman who was convicted of getting rid of some undersized grouper under a federal law originally aimed at the accounting industry and the destruction of evidence in the Enron scandal. Yates’ case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won by a single vote.

“I wanted to tell the story of people whose lives were affected,” Gorsuch said.

The book expands on a theme that has run through Gorsuch’s opinions over the years, from his criticism of the Chevron decision back when he served on a federal appeals court in Denver to his statement in May 2023 in which he called emergency measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis that killed more than 1 million Americans perhaps “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”

While Gorsuch has voted with the other conservative justices in most of the court’s momentous cases, he also has joined with the liberals in notable cases, including those in which he wrote the opinion in 2020 that expanded protections against workplace discrimination to LGBTQ people. Gorsuch also has sided with the liberal justices in all the court’s cases involving Native Americans since he joined the court.

Immigration, especially when people fighting deportation have complained they were given inadequate notice about hearings, is another area where he has typically broken with his conservative colleagues.

Gorsuch recently returned from a summer teaching gig in Porto, Portugal, for the George Mason University law school. Last year, he spent two weeks in Lisbon, Portugal, with the same program for which he was paid nearly $30,000, plus meals, lodging and travel.

He will travel to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, later this week to talk about the new book.

The day he met with AP, he said, was the first time in weeks that he put on a tie. He wore a dark blue suit, cowboy boots and a Western-style belt.

He seemed at ease, offering chocolate chip cookies and coffee to visitors and joking with a reporter who talked about an upcoming trip to the New Jersey shore. “Go fly some flags up there,” Gorsuch said, a reference to the controversy over flags, similar to those carried by Jan. 6 rioters, that were flown at homes owned by Justice Samuel Alito and his wife .

Gorsuch is not the only justice rolling out a book this summer. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir, “Lovely One,” will be published next month.

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