Graham Moore Books in Order

Graham Moore grew up in Chicago and later studied religious history at Columbia University. He has said that, as a kid, he learned to love mysteries by passing Agatha Christie novels back and forth with his mother. That early habit, reading for clues and asking how puzzles fit together, still sits at the center of his work.

Before books and film took over, he thought music would be the thing.

In New York, Moore spent much of his twenties working as a sound engineer. He mixed live shows, helped run a small recording studio on the Lower East Side with friends, and learned what it means to build something with other people in the room. He also briefly tried journalism after college, including a short stint at a news magazine, then decided it was not the right fit.

The turn toward fiction came from obsession.

In the mid-2000s, Moore became fascinated by the mysterious death of a leading Sherlock Holmes scholar. He kept wondering why nobody had written a novel about it, and finally decided he would have to learn how to do it himself. That long stretch of research and writing became The Sherlockian, his 2010 debut, a literary mystery that jumps between modern New York and Arthur Conan Doyle's London.

Readers who click with Moore usually like the same things. He enjoys buried histories, intellectual rivalries, and people who think their way into trouble. In The Sherlockian, that means literary fandom, a missing Conan Doyle diary, and a murder among Holmes devotees. In The Last Days of Night, it means patents, electricity, and the fight between Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla, seen through the eyes of young lawyer Paul Cravath. Moore has said he likes working with historical material because the facts give him something solid to push against. He can look up what happened next, then build suspense around why it happened and who paid the price.

His work in film grew alongside the novels. Moore wrote the screenplay for The Imitation Game, about Alan Turing, and won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015, along with a Writers Guild Award. Later, he made his feature directing debut with The Outfit, a tight crime film set almost entirely inside a tailor shop.

His later novels show how wide his interests are, even when the core appeal stays the same. The Holdout turns a controversial jury verdict into a modern legal thriller, with former juror Maya Seale forced to revisit a case that never really ended. The Wealth of Shadows moves to 1939 and follows Ansel Luxford into a secret Treasury effort to fight Nazi Germany through money instead of bullets. That is part of Moore's signature move. He takes subjects that might sound abstract on paper, patents, juries, economics, and finds the human panic inside them.

He likes stories about systems.

Courts, laboratories, codebreaking rooms, government offices, fan societies. Again and again, Moore writes about the hidden machinery behind public life, and about smart outsiders trying to understand rules that were never fully explained to them. Even when the subject is historical, the tension feels current. Who gets credit. Who controls the story. What power looks like behind a closed door.

Moore now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and sons. He moves between novels and film, but the through line is easy to spot: he finds a story strange enough to obsess over, researches it hard, and turns it into a gripping narrative with real ideas underneath.