Mark Ellis Books in Order

If you want the full Frank Merlin arc: Prince's Gate → Stalin's Gold → Merlin at War → A Death in Mayfair / Merlin Noir
If you want the Blitz at full force: Stalin's Gold → Merlin at War → Dead In The Water
If you want a later, darker case: A Death in Mayfair / Merlin Noir → Dead In The Water → Death of an Officer

Mark Ellis is a Welsh thriller writer whose fiction comes out of memory as much as research. He was born in England to Welsh parents, and after his father died when Ellis was still a child, his mother moved the family back to Swansea. He grew up near Langland Bay on the Gower coast, but the landscape around him came mixed with older wartime voices: his father's naval service, his mother's memories of the bombing of Swansea, and her stories of nights in London lived under bombs and doodlebugs. Those family memories gave him the period that would later define his books.

Those stories stayed with him.

Ellis was educated at Llandovery College and then at St John's College, Cambridge, where he studied law. He was called to the Bar in 1977, completed pupillage at 1 Brick Court, and practised for a short time before deciding that business life suited him better. He has said that barristers learn habits a novelist can use too, clarity, argument, judgement, and the patience to keep following a case until the picture makes sense.

His working life before publishing was long and varied. He spent time in merchant banking, moved through senior corporate roles in Britain and the United States, and in the early 1990s co-founded a computer services company with a partner. He lived in New York for a period, also spent time in Los Angeles, and built up a career that was busy, international, and demanding enough to push writing to the side for years.

Then the chance finally came.

When the business was sold to a large American corporation, Ellis used that opening to return to a childhood ambition. He has said that he always wanted to be an author, but that professional life left little room for it until later on. His first novel took more than five years to write, and when he could not find a publisher for it, he brought it out himself. He even wrote his first three books in longhand before giving in to the keyboard.

That slow start turned into the DCI Frank Merlin novels, beginning with Prince's Gate. Merlin is an Anglo-Spanish Scotland Yard detective working in London during the Second World War, and Ellis clearly enjoys every part of that setup: the murder inquiry, the political tension, the diplomatic games, the class friction, and the pressure of a city under strain. Later books such as Stalin's Gold, Merlin at War, A Death in Mayfair / Merlin Noir, Dead In The Water, and Death of an Officer carry Merlin forward through the war, case by case.

Readers usually come to Ellis for two things at once. First, there is the mystery itself, layered plots with missing people, compromised officials, spies, gangsters, crooked businessmen, and sudden violence. Second, there is the setting, blackout streets, bomb damage, rationing, embassy politics, wartime clubland, and the uneasy feeling that ordinary crime kept thriving while the country fought for survival. His books often bring real historical figures and real events close to the fictional case without letting the history lesson take over.

War never sits quietly in the background of these books.

Ellis is especially interested in the Home Front, the version of wartime Britain that was harsh, compromised, and full of opportunity for the wrong people. Looting, corruption, vice, and profiteering appear again and again in the Merlin series, and so do outsiders, refugees, and people caught between governments. He does a lot of period research before writing, often spending weeks on the exact slice of time a novel will cover, and has said that many of his plot ideas arrive during that research stage.

His work has earned steady crime-fiction attention. Merlin at War was longlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Historical Dagger in 2018, and Ellis is a member of both Crime Cymru and the Crime Writers' Association. Recent author notes place him in London, and he is the sort of crime writer who treats setting as part of the mystery, not just decoration. He found his subject a little later than some writers do, but once he got there he knew exactly what to do with it.