Allison Montclair Books in Order

If you want the full story from the beginning: The Right Sort of Man → A Royal Affair → A Rogue's Company
If you like royal intrigue and high society trouble: A Royal Affair → Murder at the White Palace
If you want the spy-heavy books: The Unkept Woman → An Excellent Thing in a Woman → Fire Must Burn
If you want a shorter side case once you're hooked: The Right Sort of Man → A Royal Affair → The Haunting of the Desks

Allison Montclair is the pen name of Alan Gordon, and his path to fiction was never especially tidy. He was born in Texas to two musicians, grew up in New Jersey, and by his own account spent plenty of time soaking up Agatha Christie paperbacks, James Bond movies, music, and stories. That mix still feels present in the books: mystery, danger, timing, and a sharp sense that people are rarely only one thing.

He studied at Swarthmore, where the tug of war between theater, literature, and practical adulthood ended, for the moment, with law school. Gordon went on to the University of Chicago Law School and then to New York City, where he built a career as a public defender. That work put him in courtrooms, interview rooms, and the middle of other people's crises, which turns out to be pretty solid training for a mystery writer.

He knows how people talk when the stakes are high.

Gordon has said that legal training taught him precision, and that trial work trained him to look for the weak point in a story. You can see that in his fiction. His plots are carefully built, but they never feel cold. He started writing regularly again around age thirty, and later added musicals to the mix too, finding that the law, the theater, and the fiction all fed one another in odd but useful ways.

It's an unusual combination, but it seems to suit him just fine.

Before the Allison Montclair books, Gordon was already known for the Fools' Guild mysteries, written under his own name. Titles like Thirteenth Night and A Death in the Venetian Quarter use medieval Europe, Shakespearean echoes, and a secret guild of jesters, spies, and problem-solvers. They show the same interests that turn up later in the postwar novels: history that feels lived in, plots that move, and characters who use wit as both shield and weapon.

Then came the Allison Montclair name and the Sparks & Bainbridge series. The Right Sort of Man introduced Iris Sparks and Gwen Bainbridge, two women running a marriage bureau in battered postwar London and stumbling into murder almost at once. Later books like A Royal Affair, The Lady from Burma, and Fire Must Burn keep widening their world, from royal scandal to espionage to the everyday heartbreak of people trying to rebuild a life after the war. Readers tend to love the push and pull between Iris and Gwen as much as the mysteries themselves. One is fast, prickly, and secretive. The other is steady, practical, and tougher than she first appears.

The series also gave Gordon, writing as Montclair, room to bring together several things he clearly enjoys: strong women, hidden wartime histories, class tension, black humor, romance, and the question of who gets to start over. The Right Sort of Man was named Best Mystery of 2019 by the American Library Association's Reading List Council, which helped announce the series to a wider mystery crowd. Still, the appeal is pretty simple. These are smart books with lively dialogue and characters who keep earning your attention.

Away from the page, Gordon has also written lyrics and librettos for musical theater and won the Kleban Prize as a librettist. He lives in New York City and has continued his legal work while writing. That balance may explain why his books feel both tightly engineered and deeply interested in ordinary human mess, because he has clearly spent a lot of time around it.