Lawrence H Levy Books in Order

Lawrence H. Levy was born in Brooklyn and raised in New York City, a background that later gave his historical mysteries a strong feel for the city’s streets, neighborhoods, and social divides. Before he published a novel, he built a long career in television as a writer, producer, actor, and screenwriting teacher.

Levy attended Cornell, where he wanted to write but felt intimidated by the major writers discussed in his English classes. After college, he studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse with Sanford Meisner and worked as an actor for about six years. That training stayed with him, especially the attention to character, motivation, and the small choices that make a scene work.

Then he tried television writing. His first script sold, and that early break changed the course of his career.

Levy went on to write for a long list of television shows, including Seinfeld, Roseanne, Family Ties, Saved by the Bell, Who’s the Boss?, The Facts of Life, The Love Boat, and Fantasy Island. He won a Writers Guild Award for the Seinfeld episode “The Mango” and received two Emmy nominations. Television taught him to work fast, revise often, and build stories with other people in the room.

Later, he traded the writers’ room for nineteenth-century Brooklyn.

The shift began while Levy was helping his son with a school paper. He became interested in the battle between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla over electric power, then started looking into real crimes from the period. That research led him to Mary Handley, a real woman who was asked by the Brooklyn Police Department to help investigate a high-profile murder at a time when there were no policewomen.

Levy turned that spark into Second Street Station, his first novel and the opening Mary Handley Mystery. The book introduces Mary as a sharp, stubborn young woman trying to solve a murder while proving she belongs in a world run by men. It also brings historical figures such as Edison, Tesla, and J. P. Morgan into the story. The later books, Brooklyn on Fire, Last Stop in Brooklyn, and Near Prospect Park, keep Mary at the center as her work brings her into contact with wealthy families, political power, corruption, and dangers that become increasingly personal.

The Mary Handley books mix period mystery with the everyday pressures Mary faces at home and on the job. Levy uses real events and public figures as a foundation, but the appeal is Mary herself: practical, curious, and unwilling to accept the limits other people place on her. The series also makes room for the rougher edges of Gilded Age New York, where money and influence can hide a great deal.

Alongside his fiction, Levy has taught screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University and spoken about his years in television. His path from acting to TV scripts to historical mysteries explains the brisk plotting in his novels, as well as his interest in characters who have to think on their feet.