Ben Creed Books in Order

Ben Creed is the shared pen name of Chris Rickaby and Barney Thompson. They met on a creative-writing course and brought very different working lives to the partnership, one shaped by advertising and television, the other by classical music, journalism, and a close knowledge of Russia.

Rickaby is from Newcastle upon Tyne. He began as a copywriter, worked for advertising agencies, and later started his own agency, Everything Different. His background also includes writing and producing television, so he came to fiction with an eye for momentum, clear scenes, and the kind of question that keeps a story moving.

Thompson took a quite different route. Before becoming a journalist and editor, he trained as a classical musician and spent two years studying conducting under Ilya Musin at the St Petersburg Conservatory. He is fluent in Russian, and his time in the city gave the partnership a strong foundation for writing about Soviet history, music, language, and place.

That mix matters.

Their first novel together, City of Ghosts, introduces Revol Rossel, a former violinist working as a militia investigator in Leningrad in 1951. Rossel is carrying the damage of his own past while trying to solve a case involving five bodies left on railway tracks. The book uses a murder investigation to explore a city still scarred by war and controlled by fear.

A few things run through the Ben Creed books: music, secrets, compromised officials, and people trying to stay decent when the system around them makes that difficult. The historical setting is not just wallpaper. Stalinist Leningrad affects every conversation, every clue, and every choice Rossel makes.

The debut was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger and the John Creasey New Blood Dagger in 2021.

In A Traitor's Heart, Rossel returns in an even worse position, imprisoned in an Arctic labor camp before being pulled back into a Leningrad murder investigation. The case brings him into an uneasy alliance with Major Nikitin, a man closely tied to the worst part of his past. It keeps the series focused on crime, but widens the story into wartime secrets, political maneuvering, and the dangerous business of trusting anyone.

Ben Creed works because the two writers' interests meet in the same place. Rickaby's experience in story and character pairs with Thompson's musical training, Russian fluency, and reporting background. The result is historical crime fiction with a cold, pressured setting and an investigator who has to listen closely, even when the truth is something powerful people would rather bury.