John Dee Papers Books in Order

The John Dee Papers move Phil Rickman’s fascination with borders and belief back into the sixteenth century. Here the main character is the real historical figure Dr John Dee – mathematician, astrologer, court adviser and, in these novels, an unwilling investigator into plots that tangle politics with the occult.

The first book, The Bones of Avalon, is set early in Elizabeth I’s reign. Dee, still in his early thirties, has a precarious position at court. When questions are raised about the new queen’s legitimacy, he is dispatched by William Cecil to Glastonbury, the legendary Isle of Avalon, to track down the missing bones of King Arthur. If Elizabeth can have Arthur’s remains ceremonially moved to London, the thinking goes, it will strengthen her claim to rule. What Dee finds among the abbey ruins is not a simple relic hunt but a web of murder, forged histories and rival visions of England’s future.

In The Heresy of Dr Dee, the stakes shift from Arthurian myth to the fallout from a very real scandal: the suspicious death of Robert Dudley’s wife, Amy. Dee is desperate to obtain a shewstone, a crystal through which he hopes to glimpse the hidden world, and that hope sends him and Dudley into the Welsh borderlands. They travel with a judge tasked with trying a feared outlaw, Prys Gethin, against a backdrop of legendary battlefields, brutal local politics and folk magic that refuses to stay in the past.

What links the books is Dee’s uneasy position between faith and experiment. He knows more than almost anyone about the “engines of the Hidden”, as he calls them, but he has no natural gift for visions and is painfully aware of it. His narration is clever, self-questioning and often funny, but he is also vulnerable: to the whims of monarchs, to the suspicions of both Protestants and Catholics, and to the manipulation of people who see opportunity in his reputation.

Rickman uses that voice to explore Tudor England as a lived-in place rather than a costume-drama backdrop. There are inns and muddy roads, herbalists and scryers, minor officials on the make and villagers who care more about weather and harvest than who sits on the throne. The occult elements are rooted in the beliefs of the time – angelic communication, alchemy, prophecy – and always threaded through with political risk.

Although set centuries before the Merrily Watkins books, the John Dee novels share their preoccupations: contested sacred sites, the tension between scepticism and experience, and the sense that old stories never quite stop influencing the present. Readers who enjoy historical crime with genuine strangeness and a strong sense of place will find plenty to savour here.