Adventures of Tom Derringer Books in Order

The Adventures of Tom Derringer books are Lawrence Watt-Evans having fun with old-fashioned adventure fiction. Tom is a professional adventurer in an alternate late nineteenth century where the world looks mostly familiar until you notice the airships, vanished cities, lizard men, and hints that Atlantis might not be as lost as history says. That blend is the point. These books deliberately lean into the pleasures of impossible discoveries delivered with a straight face.

Tom himself is part of the charm. Born in upstate New York in 1866, he grows up on stories and journals left behind by his adventurer parents, then trains for years with unusual seriousness before setting out on his own. That gives him an earnestness that works well with the material. He is brave and curious, but he is also a bit sheltered, which means the books get to enjoy both competence and surprise.

The series is written in a consciously old adventure mode, closer in spirit to Victorian juveniles and edisonades than to modern wisecracking steampunk. That does not mean it is dusty. It means Watt-Evans is borrowing the energy of those stories, hidden passages, scientific marvels, underground terrors, impossible machines, and running it through his own cleaner, more modern storytelling instincts.

It is old-fashioned on purpose.

The first books move Tom through big, colorful dangers: strange aircraft over the Arizona Territory, hidden tunnels, prehistoric threats, and the kind of inventions that make history look as if it took a sharp turn somewhere just off the map. Each novel works as its own adventure, but they also build a pleasing picture of a world where professional adventuring is somehow both absurd and entirely respectable.

Because the tone is lighter than in Watt-Evans's darker fantasy, these are easy books to sink into when you want momentum and imaginative scenery. There is peril, of course, but the mood is more exhilarated than grim. Much of the pleasure comes from seeing what impossible thing Tom will encounter next, and how matter-of-factly he will try to deal with it.

If you like lost-world fiction, period adventure, and fantasy that knows how to keep moving, this series is a very enjoyable side of Watt-Evans's work. Start with Tom Derringer and the Aluminum Airship and follow the books in order for the best sense of Tom's growth and the world's widening oddness.