An Underhand Invention Books in Order

An Underhand Invention begins in 1912 with Lieutenant Gilbert Maltravers, a well-connected naval officer who should have an easy, respectable career in battleships. His father is an admiral, his uniform marks him as the right sort, and the old Navy knows exactly what it expects from men like him.

Gilbert is bored.

The new submarine service offers excitement, faster advancement, and a much greater chance of an early death. To many in the old Navy, submarines are ungentlemanly, sneaking machines that upset everything a proper fleet is meant to be. To Gilbert, that is part of the appeal.

The series follows him from pre-war experimentation into the first years of the First World War. In A New Trade, the Navy has submarines but no settled doctrine for using them. Gilbert is sent to the Mediterranean in an E Class boat, leaving his new wife behind and hoping someone will understand what his duty is supposed to be. By A New Sort of War, the fight beneath the sea is changing the rules from Aden to the west coast of Ireland.

The tension is partly military and partly cultural. Dreadnought admirals still think in terms of great fleets, while submarines and small ships begin taking the war to enemy coasts. Wareham shows the Royal Navy at war with the enemy and with its own assumptions.

Start with Damned Un-English, then read A New Trade and A New Sort of War. The books work as a focused naval sequence about innovation, class prejudice, and the ugly birth of undersea warfare.