Charles Latimer Books in Order

Charles Latimer is a quiet academic and crime novelist who discovers that real conspiracies are messier than anything he puts on the page. Across his two appearances he moves from curious onlooker to uneasy participant in other people’s secret wars.

In A Coffin for Dimitrios (first published in Britain as The Mask of Dimitrios), Latimer is enjoying a trip to Istanbul when a Turkish colonel shows him the body of a notorious criminal, Dimitrios Makropoulos. Intrigued, Latimer decides to reconstruct Dimitrios's life as background for a book. That decision carries him through port cities and capitals around the Balkans and Western Europe, as he interviews bankers, smugglers, policemen and ex-lovers who knew the dead man.

Each new encounter changes the portrait of Dimitrios and quietly raises the chances that Latimer himself will not make it home.

Thirty years later, in The Intercom Conspiracy, Latimer has become a successful historian-novelist. A small, strident political magazine called Intercom suddenly begins publishing genuine military secrets, and its exhausted editor, Theodore Carter, finds himself terrorised by unknown agencies. Latimer is commissioned to write a book explaining the affair, and the novel takes the form of his notes, interviews and draft chapters as he pieces together how two minor NATO officers turned their resentment into a lucrative blackmail scheme.

The Latimer books are less about derring-do than about curiosity and its costs. Latimer has no training as a spy, but he has a historian’s patience and a storyteller’s instinct for connections. That makes him dangerous to people who would prefer their crimes to stay buried, and it gives the novels a layered, reflective tone.

Readers who start with A Coffin for Dimitrios get a vivid tour of the pre-war underworld, seen through the eyes of a man who thinks he is safely above it. The Intercom Conspiracy revisits him decades later in a more cynical Cold War landscape, where information itself has become a commodity and even a writer’s research can put him in mortal danger.