Clifford Irving Books in Order

Told against a New York backdrop, this early novel follows friends whose ambitions, loyalties, and desires keep colliding. Irving turns their chase for love, money, and self-invention into a lean story about charm, compromise, and losing badly.

In the lawless West, Gavin Roy bends a New Mexico valley to his will and calls it order. The real fight comes from within his own household, as his rebellious son turns the family story into a bitter struggle over power and inheritance.

After the Civil War, ruthless Gavin Roy builds an empire in Diablo Valley and rules it through fear. When his rebellious son returns, old wounds reopen in a hard western about land, power, and the cost of trying to own other people.

Co-written with Herbert Burkholz, this nonfiction book looks at the hidden world of modern espionage. Irving moves through spycraft, clandestine operations, and the political games behind them, showing how secrecy became a central tool of the Cold War.

John Burden is unexpectedly elevated to a top United Nations post as international tensions spiral toward war. As he questions the American line, he becomes a target at home and abroad in a political thriller that races through Manhattan.

Irving profiles art forger Elmyr de Hory, a man who sold fake masters with style, nerve, and a talent for reinvention. The book is about forged paintings, but also about performance, authenticity, and the people who want to be fooled.

Drawing on his time in the region, Irving gives a short, vivid account of the Six-Day War in June 1967. The focus is on Israel's fight for survival, the battles around Jerusalem, and the immediacy of a reporter close to events.

Irving's first full telling of the Howard Hughes affair lays out the hoax from his side, with Richard Suskind alongside. It is a brisk, self-justifying insider narrative about ambition, performance, and a fraud that grew too large to control.

Written with Richard Suskind, this is Irving's inside account of the Howard Hughes caper, from forged letters to publishing panic. The book follows how the scheme was built, sold, and finally pulled apart under scrutiny.

CIA inventor Eddie Mancuso and his KGB opposite number, Vasily Borgneff, are masters of unusual killing devices. When their own services decide they know too much, the two men turn their tradecraft back on the people who trained them.

Irving retells the Howard Hughes affair from the inside, following the pitch, the performance, and the collapse of the fake autobiography. It reads like a caper memoir, but it also shows how badly publishers, reporters, and readers wanted to believe.

This notorious forged autobiography imagines Howard Hughes telling his own story, from ambition and fame to secrecy and obsession. It is important less as biography than as the centerpiece of one of publishing's most audacious literary frauds.

A young Tom Mix rides into revolutionary Mexico and falls in with Pancho Villa in 1913. The journey gives Irving room for action, danger, and a harder look at heroism, violence, and the stories nations tell about themselves.

Retired spy craftsmen Eddie Mancuso and Vasily Borgneff are pulled back into action to hunt a dangerous sleeper agent. The result is a fast Cold War chase full of uneasy alliances, odd killings, and men who trust tradecraft more than governments.

In 1943 a Berlin homicide inspector is sent to a Polish death camp to solve a series of murders. What begins as an investigation becomes a moral reckoning as he confronts the machinery of genocide and a brewing revolt.

Irving reconstructs the Campbell murder case, in which Houston attorney James Campbell and his wife were found shot to death in their home. The book follows the investigation and the bitter Texas court battle that turned private grief into public spectacle.

Houston lawyer Warren Blackburn defends two murder cases that seem unrelated, one involving a nightclub owner, the other a desperate immigrant. As the trials start to connect, the courtroom fight becomes a test of conscience as well as skill.

Florida lawyer Ted Jaffe is forced back into a murder case he thought was settled when evidence suggests a man on death row may have been wrongly convicted. Saving him could destroy Ted's career, marriage, and carefully buried past.

New York criminal lawyer Dennis Conway moves to secluded Springhill, Colorado, for love and a quieter life. Then two bodies are found in the snow, his in-laws are accused, and the town's silence becomes as threatening as the case itself.

Set during the Depression, this novella follows the adventures of a wandering Jewish traveler moving through the Deep South. Romance, reinvention, and regional color all matter, but so does the outsider's eye on America itself.

Billy Braverman is a gifted twelve-year-old, a TV star, and a rock climber. When juvenile court charges him with murdering his girlfriend's father, the case turns into a searching look at brilliance, innocence, and what adults refuse to see.

Irving records the 17 months he served after the Howard Hughes hoax, with sharp observations about federal prisons, humiliation, boredom, and survival. It is part confession, part prison chronicle, and part study of how institutions try to break people.