Jonathan Hemlock Books in Order

The Jonathan Hemlock books are Trevanian's sly take on the spy thriller. On paper, Hemlock sounds almost excessive: an art professor, a respected critic, a first-rate mountain climber, a serious collector, and a former assassin for a covert government outfit. In practice, that overloaded setup is the point. Hemlock is cultivated, prickly, funny, and never fully at peace with the violent work he keeps getting dragged back toward.

Start with The Eiger Sanction. Hemlock has stepped away from killing and built a life around teaching, judging art, and enjoying the comforts his money can buy. Then he is forced into one more assignment, one that sends him toward the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland. He has to join a climbing team, figure out which man is his target, and survive a mountain that may be more dangerous than the mission itself. The alpine setting matters here. The cold, the height, and the technical pressure are not just backdrop, they are part of the engine of the story.

The Loo Sanction keeps Hemlock in the same uneasy role but changes the scenery and the flavor. This time the action moves through London, British intelligence, and the polished but shabby edges of the art world. Hemlock is blackmailed into helping deal with Maximillian Strange, a grotesque operator who uses secretly filmed blackmail material against powerful people. The second book is still a thriller, but it also opens into caper, farce, and satire. Trevanian has fun with institutions here, especially intelligence services, fashionable taste, and the absurd ways respectable people hide their appetites.

Hemlock is not a tidy hero.

What makes the series stick is the push and pull between refinement and brutality. Hemlock cares deeply about paintings, money, food, drink, expertise, and doing things well. He can be vain, smug, and very funny, but he is also competent in ways that make him hard to dismiss. Trevanian uses that tension to play with the spy genre instead of simply serving it straight. These books have action and danger, but they also have a dry comic edge and a running interest in what happens when a civilized surface covers ugly systems.

The settings do a lot of the work. Long Island, Swiss climbing routes, London streets, auction rooms, private collections, and intelligence offices all belong to the same slightly warped world, one where elegance and corruption keep sharing the room. Across both novels, the ongoing thread is Hemlock trying to protect a private life built around taste and control while governments and blackmailers keep treating him like a weapon they can pick up again.

Read the series in order, The Eiger Sanction first, then The Loo Sanction. The second book assumes you already know who Hemlock is and why he is so difficult to manage. If you like thrillers with a difficult central character, strong set pieces, and a mocking sense of humor, this is a compact series that gets to its point fast. The Eiger Sanction was adapted into a 1975 film directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, but the books are still the best way to get Hemlock's voice.