James Douglas Books in Order

If you want the full Jamie Saintclair story: The Doomsday Testament → The Isis Covenant → The Excalibur Codex → The Samurai Inheritance
If you like wartime secrets and Nazi-era shadows: The Doomsday Testament → The Samurai Inheritance
If Arthurian mystery is the draw: The Excalibur Codex
If you just want one quick sample: The Doomsday Testament

Douglas Jackson was born in Jedburgh, in the Scottish Borders, in the summer of 1956, and he grew up there with books close by. He left school just before his sixteenth birthday, with a gift for English, a strong reading habit, and no clear plan for what came next.

His first job was an unusual one. Through a youth scheme, he spent a summer helping restore a Roman marching camp at Pennymuir in the Cheviot Hills, turning turf and working in a landscape full of old military ghosts.

That stayed with him.

Journalism came next, and it shaped a huge part of his working life. He started as a junior reporter with a local paper, then spent more than three decades in local and national newspapers, including work with the Daily Record and The Scotsman. By the time he left that world in 2009, he had risen to assistant editor at The Scotsman and had spent years writing, editing, and learning how to keep a story moving.

Fiction arrived later than it does for some writers. In 2005, he began working on a novel in spare hours and on train journeys, and that early project eventually led to Caligula and Claudius. Those books introduced readers to Rufus, an animal trainer swept into the danger and absurdity of the imperial court, and they showed what Jackson does well, action, pressure, and a strong feel for the way power distorts everyone around it.

His best-known run under his own name is probably the Rome sequence that begins with Hero of Rome. In those books, the soldier Gaius Valerius Verrens moves through rebellion, civil war, and political violence as the empire shakes around him. Readers who like Jackson tend to like that mix of pace and grit, along with the sense that history is not decoration in these novels, it is the thing making life harder.

He also stepped sideways into modern thrillers under the name James Douglas. Starting with The Doomsday Testament, he created Jamie Saintclair, an art recovery expert who keeps getting pulled into old secrets with very current consequences. The Isis Covenant, The Excalibur Codex, and The Samurai Inheritance keep that same blend of wartime shadows, missing objects, myth, and pursuit.

History is always doing something to his characters.

That is true in his later books, too. The Wall and The Barbarian move to the last years of Roman Britain and follow Marcus Flavius Victor through a world that is fraying at the edges. In the wartime crime novels Blood Roses and Blood Sacrifice, Jan Kalisz works the brutal streets of occupied Warsaw, trying to survive, investigate, and serve the resistance at the same time. Jackson has also written modern crime around Glen Savage, a damaged ex-soldier with a strange gift, which shows how comfortable he is moving between ancient battlefields and present-day danger.

What links all these books is the kind of protagonist he likes. Jackson writes about capable people under strain, soldiers, investigators, fixers, men asked to choose between loyalty, conscience, and survival. The settings matter, but so does momentum. Even when the background is deeply researched, the books are built to carry you forward.

He now lives in Bridge of Allan, near Stirling, with his wife Alison, and they have three children. Away from the desk, he has said that life is at its most relaxing by a river with a fly-fishing rod in hand, which feels like a fair balance for a writer who spends so much time putting his characters through trouble.