Charlie Owen Books in Order

If you want the full Handstead story: Horse's Arse → Foxtrot Oscar → Bravo Jubilee → Two Tribes
If you want the rawest entry into his crime fiction: Horse's Arse → Foxtrot Oscar
If you want his later history writing: For Those in Peril → One Night on the Somme

Charlie Owen spent thirty years in the police service, working with two forces in London and the Home Counties and rising to the rank of Inspector. That long stretch in uniform became the bedrock of everything he later wrote.

Then he started over.

After retiring from policing, Owen moved into a second career in security services at an investment bank. That move from public duty to private security seems to have given him both distance and material. Writing grew out of that later phase, and his first novel, Horse's Arse, drew heavily on the rougher side of old-school police work. He did not arrive as a career creative-writing student or a publishing insider, which helps explain why his fiction feels so work-driven, slangy, and full of people who sound as if they have spent years rubbing each other up the wrong way.

His best-known books are the four Handstead New Town novels, Horse's Arse, Foxtrot Oscar, Bravo Jubilee, and Two Tribes. They are set in the 1970s in a fictional North Manchester overspill nicknamed Horse's Arse, where local villains, street-level coppers, and CID officers are trapped together in a place nobody really wants to be. Rather than building the stories around one polished detective, Owen writes in groups, with officers such as Dan Harrison, Psycho, Pizza, Ally, and the Grim Brothers pushing the action from different angles.

They are not tidy mysteries.

Readers who click with Owen usually seem to like the same things: the coarse humour, the strong sense of period, the station-house banter, and the fact that the police are rarely presented as spotless heroes. The comedy is often black, but it is still comedy. His novels lean hard into the blurred line between order and chaos, and they do it with the confidence of someone who knew the job from the inside. Even when the plots turn on gang violence, riots, or ugly local politics, the books stay focused on how people talk, cope, and lose their tempers under pressure.

Owen's later work shows that his interests reach beyond crime fiction. In For Those in Peril, he turns to family and maritime history through the life of his great-uncle James Holland Walker, a White Star Line seaman whose career included shipwrecks, rescues, and several awards for gallantry. In One Night on the Somme, he writes about the Lonsdale Pals Battalion and the long shadow of shell shock, which feels like a natural extension of the same curiosity that shaped his police novels, ordinary people under strain, and institutions that can fail them.

That thread ties a lot of his work together. Whether he is writing about coppers in a battered new town, sailors in danger at sea, or soldiers pushed past endurance, he keeps returning to hard jobs, group loyalty, and the damage done by bad decisions from above. More recent author notes place him in Dorset with his wife and their dog, Eddie, while earlier notes described him as married with six children. However you come to his books, through the Handstead novels or the later history titles, Owen reads like a writer shaped first by experience and only then by the page.