Ian Moore Books in Order

Ian Moore has built the kind of career that sounds slightly unlikely until you line it up properly. For years he was a stand-up comedian, radio regular, and corporate host in the UK. Then, after settling in rural France, he turned that same dry, watchful voice into books.

He has said that when he first visited this part of France in 1990, he immediately thought it was the sort of place where he could one day retire and write light comic novels.

Before the novels came the long comedy apprenticeship. Moore spent nearly thirty years in stand-up, regularly headlining the Comedy Store in London and performing around the UK and overseas. He also became a familiar face and voice on shows such as Fighting Talk, The Now Show, and Richard Osman's House of Games. His comic style, on stage and on the page, tends to work through understatement, irritation, and the sense that ordinary life is only ever one step away from farce.

He has described his upbringing as suburban, and he spent part of his childhood in Norfolk after moving there from Blackburn at seven. At secondary school he got into Mod style, something that clearly stuck. The sharp clothes, the self-awareness, and the slight feeling of being out of place all show up again in his writing. He also has a habit, both in performance and prose, of making himself the joke first.

France stopped being a nice idea and became the real plan. Moore and his family eventually moved to the Loire Valley, swapping English noise and tight space for a bigger, stranger, more rural life. For years he commuted back to Britain for gigs while home life filled up with animals, chores, guest rooms, and the small daily absurdities of living between two cultures.

The peace he was after did not exactly arrive.

One especially chaotic day helped turn that life into prose. Moore has said he wrote down a bout of family and animal mayhem on a flight to a show, posted it, and was urged to keep going. That became a blog, and the blog led to a publisher. Out of it came A la Mod and C'est Modnifique!, books that turn livestock, language slips, village customs, and domestic disorder into something very funny.

Those memoirs are a good guide to what readers tend to like about him. He can be grumpy, but never in a mean way. He likes the mismatch between French and English habits, the dream of a quiet country life, and the fact that real life keeps wrecking the dream. Even when he is complaining, there is warmth under it.

When the nonfiction had gone as far as he wanted, Moore shifted into crime fiction. He has said he still wanted to write about the funny differences between the French and the English, but he wanted the pull of genre to carry it. That led to Death and Croissants in 2021, which introduced Richard Ainsworth and Valérie d'Orçay in the fictional Follet Valley, became a bestseller, was translated widely, and was optioned for television. The later Follet Valley books keep that same mix of cozy mystery plotting, village gossip, food, landscape, and very dry comic timing.

He has also written a darker Loire Valley series built around investigating magistrate Matthieu Lombard, including The Man Who Didn't Burn and Dead Behind the Eyes. These books keep Moore's feel for place, but they lean more into procedure, grief, secrecy, and the pressure that sits under postcard France. These days he spends most of his time at home in France with his family and livestock, writes, records his audiobooks, and does less stand-up than he once did. He has joked that he takes himself less seriously now, and that sounds about right.