Andrew Wilson Books in Order

If you want his Agatha Christie mysteries: A Talent for Murder → A Different Kind of Evil → Death in a Desert Land → I Saw Him Die
If you want a standalone psychological thriller: The Lying Tongue
If you want literary biographies: Beautiful Shadow → Mad Girl's Love Song
If you want larger-than-life true stories: Harold Robbins → Alexander McQueen
If you want narrative history: Shadow of the Titanic

Andrew Wilson was born in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, in 1967, and he came to writing by way of study and journalism. He read English at King's College London, then trained in periodical journalism at City University, London.

Long before he turned Agatha Christie into a fictional detective, he was writing for newspapers and magazines. His journalism has appeared in the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Evening Standard, the Washington Post, and Smithsonian, among others.

That reporting habit never really left him.

You can feel it in the way his books are built. Wilson often starts with a real person, a stack of documents, or an unresolved mystery, then follows the trail patiently until a life, or a story, begins to take shape.

His first book, Beautiful Shadow, set the pattern. Using Patricia Highsmith's diaries, letters, and notebooks, he wrote the first major biography of the suspense writer. The book was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award and went on to win the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Biography and a Lambda Literary Award.

From there he kept moving between literary lives, public figures, and stranger corners of 20th-century culture. Harold Robbins looks at the swagger and self-invention behind one of publishing's most flamboyant bestselling authors. Mad Girl's Love Song turns back to Sylvia Plath's years before Ted Hughes and asks what shaped the poet before she became a legend. In Alexander McQueen, he follows the designer from East London beginnings to the top of fashion, while keeping sight of the strain and sadness behind the public image.

He also likes stories with a built-in shadow.

That helps explain Shadow of the Titanic, which focuses not just on the sinking but on what happened to the people who survived it. And it helps explain why his fiction feels so grounded. Even in the standalone thriller The Lying Tongue, set in Venice and centered on a young assistant and a reclusive novelist, Wilson is interested in secrecy, self-invention, and the way ambition can slide into danger.

His best-known fiction series puts Agatha Christie herself at the center of the case. Beginning with A Talent for Murder, then continuing through A Different Kind of Evil, Death in a Desert Land, and I Saw Him Die, the books mix real episodes from Christie's life with classic whodunit structures. They are playful, but they are also carefully researched, with settings and social detail that make the period feel lived in.

Alongside the books, Wilson has taught crime writing through Faber Academy's online course and mentored writers through the Gold Dust scheme. He still works close to the worlds that shaped him, journalism, research, and the careful construction of story. That blend of fact-finding and imagination is the clearest thread running through everything he writes.