Jonathan Cain Books in Order

If you want the true entry point: Saigon Commandos → Code Zero Shots Fired → Dinky Dau Death
If you want the series at full speed: Boonie-Rat Body Burning → Di Di Mau or Die → Sac Mau, Victor Charlie
If you want the big war arc: Torturers of Tet → Hollowpoint Hell → Suicide Squad

Jonathan Cain was one of the pen names used by Colorado-born action writer Nicholas Cain. What made his paperbacks stand out was not polish or literary posing, it was the sense that he had actually been in these rooms, on these streets, and inside these systems. His books come out of military police work, regular police work, and a long memory for the way people behave when pressure never lets up.

He was born and raised in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. In 1972, during the Vietnam era, he volunteered for Army service and worked as a military policeman. His time in uniform took him through Vietnam and later to posts in Thailand and South Korea, and he left the Army in 1975 with the rank of sergeant. That mix of discipline, bureaucracy, danger, and dark humor never really left his writing.

It gave him his subject.

After the Army, Cain went back to Colorado and stayed in law enforcement. He worked as a state trooper in the Denver area and later as a city police officer in Thornton. He spent about a decade doing the job, and that practical experience shows up everywhere in his fiction: the patrol rhythms, the petty scams, the paperwork, the uneasy banter, and the way a routine call can turn ugly in seconds.

His path into publishing started with a nonfiction manuscript called Saigon Alley. Publishers passed on it, but the idea was strong enough to survive rejection. He was eventually offered a contract on the condition that he turn the material into fiction, and that decision led straight to the Saigon Commandos novels. It was a commercial nudge, but it also gave him the space to blend memory, invention, and procedural detail.

That was the break.

Beginning with Saigon Commandos in 1983, Cain built a twelve-book run around Sergeant Mark Stryker and the 716th MPs in wartime Saigon. Titles like Code Zero Shots Fired, Boonie-Rat Body Burning, Mad Minute, and Torturers of Tet show what readers tend to like about him. These are not front-line infantry epics. They are cop stories set inside a war, full of deserters, black-market operators, street crimes, snipers, frightened civilians, and officers trying to hold a city together one ugly shift at a time.

He wrote in other lanes too. Under the names Nik Uhernik and Jack Hawkins, he produced more action series, including War Dogs and the early Chopper-1 books. Writing under his own name, he created the Luke Abel novels, often grouped as the Little Saigon series and launched with Abel's War. Those books move the action to Southern California, but the concerns are familiar: Vietnamese and American worlds rubbing against each other, cops caught between institutions and communities, and veterans still living with the long tail of the war.

One Jonathan Cain novel even made it to the screen. Mad Minute, the ninth Saigon Commandos book, became the basis for the 1988 film Saigon Commandos. That kind of afterlife fits his work. These novels were written fast and sold as paperbacks, but readers still come back to them because the setting feels specific and the job at the center of them feels real.

By 1990, after writing more than thirty books, Cain stepped away from fiction and became a private investigator in Los Angeles. He later taught classes on investigative work and wrote a pair of practical manuals drawn from that trade. In a way, that ending makes sense. He spent years turning cops, cases, and survival into fiction, then went back to the same world without the invented names.