John Hall Books in Order

John Hall grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in a big extended family, with a younger brother and more than twenty cousins close at hand. He has said he still remembers the first book he ever read on his own, Harry the Dirty Dog. That early jolt of reading stayed with him.

By fifth grade, he had already decided he wanted to be a writer. He even drafted a first novel, The Mystery of the Leopard's Eyes, and later joked that the manuscript still sat in a desk drawer.

Publishing did not happen right away. Hall spent many years in the civil service before turning to fiction full time, and that long detour seems to suit the way he writes, patiently, with an eye for process, motive, and the slow reveal. He also built a deep connection with the Sherlock Holmes world as a reader and scholar, long before he became known for Holmes pastiches of his own.

That Sherlockian side shows up early in I Remember The Date Very Well, his chronology of the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories. It is exactly the kind of project a devoted Holmes reader would take on, close reading, date checking, and trying to make tidy order out of Watson's famously messy record. Hall later returned to that same playful, analytical side in The Abominable Wife and Other Unrecorded Cases of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, a book about the cases Holmes only ever mentions in passing.

He likes the clues around the edges.

As a novelist, Hall is best known for bringing Holmes and Watson back into action in books such as Sherlock Holmes and the Telephone Murder Mystery, The Travels of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and the Disgraced Inspector, and Sherlock Holmes at the Raffles Hotel. These stories stay close to the pleasure of the originals, a baffling problem, Holmes's sharp reasoning, Watson's steady presence, but Hall also pushes outward into school scandals, political tension, travel, and the unease of a changing world. A new invention like the telephone can matter as much as an old grudge.

He did not limit himself to Baker Street. Special Commission moves back to 1449 for a medieval murder investigation, while The Ardagh Emeralds turns to A. J. Raffles and Bunny Manders, showing Hall's fondness for the wider crime fiction world that grew up beside Conan Doyle. Even when he changes setting or hero, he keeps coming back to puzzles, hidden motives, and the social detail around a crime.

Another piece of his career sits outside Holmes altogether. His book Death of a Collector, which introduced the detective Freddie Darnborough, won a Sherlock magazine competition for the best new fictional detective, and Darnborough later appeared again in short stories and radio plays.

That matters because Hall was not only a skilled continuation writer, he could invent his own investigators too.

Author notes over the years also sketch a few smaller human details. Hall has been described as a collector of tobacco pipes and a long-time Sherlockian, and later biographical notes place him in New York City. That feels about right. His work has the energy of someone who enjoys both the game of deduction and the company of readers who like arguing the case afterward.