Curtain Call Books in Order

Anthony Quinn’s Curtain Call sequence is best understood as a loose set of connected historical novels rather than a case-by-case mystery series. Curtain Call, Freya, and Eureka move from 1930s London to the postwar years and then into the glare of 1967. You can read each book on its own, but the links are part of the fun.

The first book, Curtain Call, starts in the summer of 1936. Nina Land, a West End actress, sees an attempted murder in a hotel room and realizes she may be the only person who can identify the killer. The catch is simple and awful: admitting what she saw would expose her own secret visit with a married man.

From there, Quinn opens the story out into Soho, theatreland, newspaper offices, clubs, rented rooms, and drawing rooms where reputation is a form of currency. The cast includes theatre critic Jimmy Erskine, painter Stephen Wyley, and people on the edges of polite society who know more than they can safely say. It has the shape of a murder story, but it is just as interested in fear, vanity, love, politics, and the quiet bargains people make to stay comfortable.

The danger is public, but the pressure is often private.

Freya picks up the wider world after the war. Freya Wyley, Stephen’s daughter, meets Nancy Holdaway on VE Day, and their friendship becomes the book’s engine. They want work, love, independence, and recognition, and they do not always want those things in the same way. The setting moves through Oxford, Fleet Street, and postwar London as Britain changes around them.

Eureka jumps to swinging London, where Nat Fane is trying to write a film script for the German director Reiner Werther Kloss. Actress Billie Cantrip wants her break, Freya is still asking sharp questions, and the film business turns out to be a place where art, money, sex, and danger sit too close together.

The tone is smart, social, and shadowed. Quinn enjoys the sparkle of theatres, newspapers, parties, and film sets, but he keeps watching what happens backstage. The 2024 film The Critic is based on Curtain Call, with Jimmy Erskine closer to the centre, but the novels themselves are broader ensemble pieces about London and the people trying to survive its changing rules.