Albert Edward, Prince of Wales Books in Order

Peter Lovesey’s Albert Edward, Prince of Wales mysteries turn a real future king into a comic amateur detective. Albert Edward, better known as Bertie, was the eldest son of Queen Victoria and later became King Edward VII. In these books, he is still the Prince of Wales: sociable, indulgent, vain, hungry, romantic, and not nearly as discreet as his position requires.

He also fancies himself a sleuth.

That joke powers the series, but the books are not just royal farce. Lovesey uses Bertie’s privilege as a way to move him into places an ordinary detective might never reach. Racecourses, country-house shooting parties, Parisian nightlife, royal circles, and private scandals all open up because Bertie can knock on almost any door, or barge through it without knocking.

The first book, Bertie and the Tinman, begins with the death of the great jockey Fred Archer, known as the Tinman. The official explanation does not satisfy Bertie, who turns his curiosity toward the racing world and the murky facts around Archer’s last moments. In Bertie and the Seven Bodies, he joins a shooting party at Desborough Hall, where the guests begin dying in a pattern that is hard to ignore. Bertie and the Crime of Passion takes him to Paris, where a murder at the Moulin Rouge pulls him into a French investigation and brings Sarah Bernhardt into the action.

Bertie is not a polished detective. That is the fun of it. He notices things, misses things, overestimates himself, and still sometimes stumbles toward the truth. Lovesey lets him be foolish without making him empty. Under the appetite and vanity is a man who likes being useful, especially when the alternative is another lecture about duty and scandal.

The series has a lighter touch than the Sergeant Cribb books, but it shares the same interest in Victorian and late nineteenth-century manners. Meals, clothes, gossip, sex, sport, and status all matter because they decide who can speak, who must hide, and who can get away with a crime.

Read the books in order. Bertie and the Tinman sets the tone, and the next two novels build naturally on the pleasure of watching a royal amateur try to out-detect the professionals.