James Becker Books in Order

James Becker is the thriller pen name of British writer Peter Stuart Smith, a former Royal Navy helicopter pilot who turned his fascination with history and covert operations into a second career. Under that name he writes fast moving conspiracy tales that link present day investigations to buried relics and forgotten battles.

He was born in Cambridge, England, and his route to the cockpit was anything but direct. Before joining the forces he stacked supermarket shelves, pumped petrol, worked on a factory production line, and even spent time as a hospital porter and in a mortuary. Those early jobs gave him a close up view of ordinary lives that later fed into his fiction.

None of it felt like a straight path into publishing.

Smith eventually joined the Royal Navy and trained as a helicopter pilot with the Fleet Air Arm. He served for more than twenty years, flying during the Falklands War and taking part in covert missions in trouble spots such as Northern Ireland, Yemen and Russia. A serious eye injury cut short his flying career, and he transferred into Air Traffic Control, staying with the service until he left the Navy.

Writing began on the side. During his military years he produced articles and material for both classified and open publications, discovering that he enjoyed shaping complex technical detail into clear prose. When he started trying his hand at fiction, he leaned naturally toward the kind of stories he knew best, mixing weapons systems, bureaucracy and the small decisions that can change the course of an operation.

His first published novel was Overkill, a modern spy thriller released in 2004 under the pseudonym James Barrington. More adventures followed for agent Paul Richter, and Smith gradually built a working life that balanced day to day discipline with the freedom of the blank page. He has since used several pen names for different strands of his work, but the James Becker books are where his love of ancient and medieval history comes to the fore.

As James Becker he created undercover detective Chris Bronson and museum expert Angela Lewis, the duo at the heart of The First Apostle, The Moses Stone, The Messiah Secret and later novels. Those books send a very modern cop and a scholar into the world of lost gospels, coded parchments and dangerous sects, and readers respond to the way everyday settings collide with questions about faith, power and what people are willing to kill for.

Becker took that interest in hidden history even further in The Lost Treasure of the Templars trilogy, following bookseller Robin Jessop and encryption specialist David Mallory as they chase the legacy of the Knights Templar. Standalone novels such as The Titanic Secret and The Ripper Secret move into fully historical territory, imagining new motives behind famous disasters while keeping the pace and tension of a contemporary thriller.

After leaving the Navy, Smith settled in the Principality of Andorra, in the eastern Pyrenees, and continues to write there. He is known as a skilled combat pistol shot and remains deeply interested in how real weapons, aircraft and command chains work, details that give his fictional plots a convincing backbone.

He often talks about writing as a craft rather than a mystery, something closer to learning to fly or control an airspace than waiting for inspiration. Long military service taught him to plan carefully and then carry on regardless when things get difficult. The same steady approach runs through his books, where ordinary men and women are pushed into extreme situations and forced to decide what matters most.