Fortune (Terry Harknett) Books in Order

The Fortune books are Terry Harknett's harder American-style private-eye stories, written under the Thomas H. Stone name. The central character is Chester Fortune, a Los Angeles investigator moving through a world of rich clients, missing women, blackmail, gang pressure, and men who are happy to solve problems with fists or guns. If the Steve Wayne books feel more British and controlled, Fortune is rougher and more openly bruising.

Los Angeles is part of the appeal. These books live in a city of money, desperation, and sideways deals, where glamour and squalor sit close together. Fortune is not wandering through polite drawing rooms. He is working the kind of cases where one frightened witness, one reckless heiress, or one lying client can get him beaten, framed, or killed. Dead Set is a good example, with its murdered wife, stolen medals, blackmail problem, and a client family that only makes the job worse.

The series is also shorter and sharper than a lot of long-running paperback detective lines. The books get to the point quickly. Stopover for Murder, One Horse Race, Black Death, and Squeeze play all sound like titles from a man who knows he is heading straight into danger, and that is more or less the reading experience too. Harknett keeps the cases moving and rarely lets the atmosphere go soft.

What readers often respond to is Fortune himself. He is not grandly romanticised. He is a working investigator in a violent world, and the books know it. There is grit here, but it is practical grit, not decoration. People lie, panic, grab for advantage, and make situations worse. Fortune survives by staying alert a little longer than everyone else.

These are compact hardboiled reads.

If you like fast private-eye fiction with urban pressure, lowlifes and social climbers in the same frame, and a lead who gets hit as often as he scores, the Fortune books are a good way into Harknett's American crime side.