James Lear Books in Order

If you want witty historical mysteries: The Back Passage → The Secret Tunnel → A Sticky End → The Sun Goes Down
If you prefer a tougher modern thriller: The Hardest Thing → Straight Up → In the Ring
If you want a standalone about sexual self-discovery: While My Wife's Away
If you're here for historical adventure and big emotion: Hot Valley → The Low Road → The Palace Of Varieties

James Lear is the pen name of Rupert Smith, an American-born English author and journalist who was born in Washington, D.C., in 1960. He grew up in Surrey, moved to London in 1978, and has made the city his base ever since.

Before novels took over, he spent a few years trying out an academic career and decided it was not for him. Journalism turned out to be a better fit. He worked for more than twenty years in newspapers and magazines, writing for dailies, weeklies, and monthlies in Britain and elsewhere, much of it tied to entertainment and television.

That long stretch in journalism left its mark.

Under his own name, Rupert Smith wrote books such as I Must Confess, Fly on the Wall, and Service Wash, fiction shaped by the backstage worlds he knew from work. He also wrote biographies and television tie-in books, including a book linked to EastEnders. Over time he split his fiction across different names, Rupert Smith for mainstream work, James Lear for explicit queer fiction, and Rupert James for commercial women's fiction.

As James Lear, he wrote the books most readers come looking for here. The Back Passage and The Secret Tunnel turn classic British murder-puzzle machinery into funny, sexually frank historical mysteries with a lot of period atmosphere. The Palace Of Varieties opens out into 1930s London, The Hardest Thing brings in a bruised modern noir hero, and While My Wife's Away follows a far more intimate, contemporary story of sexual self-discovery.

He likes a good plot, but he also likes trouble.

Across his books, certain themes keep coming back. There are hidden lives, class games, blackmail, institutions that fail the people inside them, and men who use charm, strength, or sex as both weapon and shield. The settings matter too. Country houses, trains, wartime landscapes, London streets, and private rooms all become places where people are trying to manage desire, power, and shame at the same time.

Readers often arrive for the heat, but they stay because the novels are sharp, funny, and surprisingly humane about lonely people. His protagonists can be selfish, reckless, or absurdly overconfident, yet they keep the pages moving because Smith understands how longing and bravado work together. Even when the books get wild, he usually has a firm grip on the social rules his characters are trying to break, dodge, or survive.

In 2008, James Lear won the Erotic Award for Writer of the Year. He still lives in London, and by his own account fiction is now his full-time job, though the journalist's eye for detail, pace, and human weakness never really went away.