John Wilcox Books in Order

For the full Simon Fonthill story from the start: The Horns of the Buffalo → The Road to Kandahar → The Diamond Frontier
For Simon at his most globe-spanning: Siege of Khartoum → The War of the Dragon Lady → Treachery in Tibet
For Wilcox's World War standalones: Starshine → The Arrow's Arc
For a Cornish historical mystery: The Black Rocks of Morwenstow
If you want Wilcox's own story first: Bombs & Betty Grable

John Wilcox was born in Birmingham and grew up there during the Second World War. That part of his life stayed close to him. He later returned to it in Bombs & Betty Grable, a memoir about bombs, cinema, boyhood crushes, and the way stories can brighten even a hard week.

He liked to joke that numbers were never really his thing, but words were. That pushed him toward journalism, and he started out as a local reporter in Birmingham. He did well there, winning an early young journalist award and learning habits that would shape his fiction later: noticing small details, asking practical questions, and keeping events moving.

That training never left him.

After journalism he spent many years in industry, work that took him to different parts of the world. In the mid-1990s he sold his company and turned to writing full-time, finally giving himself room to do the thing he had wanted to do all along. By then he was living in Salisbury, and historical fiction became the work he is remembered for. He had seen enough of the world by then to know that place matters, and his novels are full of weather, distance, terrain and the stubborn facts of travel.

His best-known books are the Simon Fonthill adventures, which began with The Horns of the Buffalo in 2004. The series follows officer turned scout Simon Fonthill and his loyal companion '352' Jenkins through the Zulu War, Afghanistan, Egypt, Sudan, southern Africa, China, India and Tibet. Books like The Road to Kandahar, Siege of Khartoum and The War of the Dragon Lady show what Wilcox did well: brisk action, careful historical setting, and a real liking for characters who have to keep going when plans fall apart. He was interested in how campaigns actually worked on the ground, the marches, the scouting, the bad calls, and the sudden violence.

He was clearly drawn to stories where duty and fear arrive together.

What many readers respond to in the Fonthill books is that they are not only about famous battles. Wilcox liked scouting missions, bad terrain, divided loyalties, hard friendships and the plain, practical business of survival. As the series grows, Alice Fonthill becomes an important part of the world too, which gives the books more range than a straight march from one battlefield to the next. They feel old-school in the good sense, with momentum, clear stakes and plenty of respect for logistics.

He also wrote beyond that series. Starshine turns to the First World War and follows two friends pushed through the mud and strain of the Western Front. The Black Rocks of Morwenstow moves back to 1840s Cornwall for a tale of wrecking, storms and suspicion. In The Arrow's Arc, published in 2018, he shifts to occupied France in the winter of 1944 and mixes wartime escape with a love story and a faint touch of the uncanny. Across them all, he kept returning to courage, loyalty, longing and the way war squeezes private lives.

Family history mattered to him as well. He spoke about the First World War service of his father and six uncles, and that sense of the past as something close and personal runs through much of his work. Even when he was writing about big imperial campaigns, he kept an eye on the human cost: the fear, the mud, the waiting, the accidents, and the bits of luck that decide who gets home.

Wilcox died in 2018. He left behind a shelf of historical fiction that covers a lot of ground, but the line through it is easy to see: a Birmingham boy who became a reporter, travelled widely, and then spent his later years turning history into fast, readable adventure. For readers, that makes the books easy to pick up and very hard to mistake for anyone else's.