Charles and James Latimer Books in Order

The Charles and James Latimer books are Manning Coles in a much lighter mood. Instead of spies and border agents, these stories give you two ghostly cousins, one English, one American, who were killed in France during the Franco-Prussian War and are allowed back when their family needs help. They are usually joined by their equally troublesome pet monkey, Ulysses.

These are ghost stories with a grin.

The first book, Brief Candles, introduces the setup through Sally and Jeremy Latimer, living descendants who find themselves in a muddle involving thieves, murder, and inheritance. The dead cousins step back into the world to straighten things out, or at least to push events in the right direction. Happy Returns sends them off again, this time toward Italy, where family trouble turns into a comic run of robbers, awkward romance, and murder. In Come and Go, Richard Scroby gets mixed up with a burglar, Paris, and a very determined aunt, which is enough to bring the Latimers hurrying back once more.

What links the books is not horror or a big supernatural mythology. It is family duty. James and Charles are benevolent meddlers. They return because someone connected to them is cornered, confused, or in danger, and once they are on the scene the plot starts moving in unexpected directions. Their help is useful, but it is rarely tidy.

The tone stays airy even when the stakes are real. There are crooks, blackmailers, missing money, sudden deaths, and people in genuine trouble, but the books never settle into gloom. The pleasure comes from watching nineteenth-century ghosts bump into modern life, and from seeing old-fashioned manners applied to very lively mid-twentieth-century problems.

Place matters here too. France is important to the cousins because it is where their story ended, and continental Europe gives the series a slightly wandering, holiday feel. That suits the books well. They move easily between family comedy, mystery plotting, and supernatural caper.

They are much closer to capers than chillers.

If you know Manning Coles only from Tommy Hambledon, the Latimer books can be a surprise, but a good one. They keep the brisk pacing and knack for trouble, then trade wartime tension for comic haunting. Start with Brief Candles and read forward. The pleasure is in watching the family, living and dead, keep finding each other when things go wrong.