Captain Fantom Books in Order

The Captain Fantom books show Reginald Hill working in full blooded historical adventure mode. Writing under the name Charles Underhill, he takes the scraps of fact known about the real seventeenth century mercenary Carlo Fantom and spins them into first person memoirs full of battles, betrayals and very dark humour.

The first novel, Captain Fantom, drops you into the middle years of Fantom's career as a soldier of fortune in war torn Europe. Fantom sells his sword, and whatever other skills are required, to anyone willing to pay. Armies, faiths and frontiers change around him, but his own code is brutally simple: survival, profit and pleasure. Hill makes no attempt to tidy him into a conventional hero. Fantom can be charming, learned and funny, but he is also a rapist and a killer, and the books do not flinch from that.

The Forging of Fantom steps back to his early life. Told again as if Carlo were setting down his own story, it follows him from a rough upbringing on a Croatian farm through his first taste of war and piracy, on to Venice and beyond. Seeing how he learns languages, tactics and the value of fear fills in the gaps behind the swagger of the later captain.

Across both books the settings matter. Hill uses battlefields, besieged towns and stormy seas not just as backdrops but as places shaped by shifting alliances between empires and churches. Campaigns that might be footnotes in a history book become vivid through Fantom's amoral eye, whether he is negotiating for ransom money, riding with raiders or waiting out a bitter winter under arms.

The tone is energetic and often very funny in a bleak way, but the series is not simply blood and thunder. Hill uses Fantom's voice to probe ideas about loyalty, identity and the stories men tell about their own violence. There are no tidy redemptions on offer. Instead you get a sustained portrait of a man formed by chaos who sees clearly how fragile any cause or kingdom really is.

Readers coming from Dalziel and Pascoe will recognise the pleasure Hill takes in language and in playing against genre expectations. Here, though, the police station gives way to the campfire and the counting house, and the moral compass points somewhere far more uncomfortable.