Martin Davies Books in Order

If you want the Baker Street mysteries first: Mrs. Hudson and the Spirits' Curse → Mrs Hudson and the Malabar Rose → Mrs Hudson and the Lazarus Testament
If you want his best-known historical mystery: The Conjurer's Bird
If you prefer post-war country-house drama: The Year After
If you want spies, diplomacy, and bigger stakes: Havana Sleeping
If you want a medieval adventure: The Unicorn Road

Martin Davies was born on the Wirral and grew up in North West England. By his own account, his first brush with creative writing at Barnston Primary School did not go especially well.

What stayed with him instead was storytelling.

Davies has written about listening to his father, a gifted teller of tales, and about how those performances taught him that stories could be playful, companionable things. Then life moved on. He studied English and History at university, moved to London, worked in broadcasting, and spent years reading novels before he seriously tried writing one of his own.

He didn't come back to fiction until his late thirties. When he did, the book that got him going was Mrs. Hudson and the Spirits' Curse, a mystery set around Sherlock Holmes but told through Holmes's housekeeper and her young helper, Flotsam. Davies wrote it for his father, who had long wondered what stories Mrs Hudson might have to tell, and that sideways look at Baker Street became the seed of a whole series.

That Baker Street start opened the door to a wider body of historical fiction. After the early Mrs Hudson books came The Conjurer's Bird, built around Joseph Banks, a vanished specimen known as the Bird of Ulieta, and a modern search for what history has lost. The novel became a Richard and Judy Book Club pick and sold more than 150,000 copies, which helped introduce Davies to a much wider audience.

He has a knack for taking an old mystery and making it feel immediate.

You can see that again in The Unicorn Road, a medieval adventure about language, travel, and hidden motives, and in The Year After, a post First World War novel set around a country house full of grief, memory, and buried secrets. Then came Havana Sleeping, which moves to 1850s Cuba and mixes murder, diplomacy, and the slave trade. It was shortlisted for the 2015 CWA Historical Dagger, and it shows how comfortable Davies is with stories that combine suspense with a strong sense of place.

He never left Mrs Hudson behind for long. After the first two books he returned to the series with Mrs Hudson and the Lazarus Testament, then added Mrs Hudson and the Samarkand Conspiracy, Mrs. Hudson and the Blue Daisy Affair, Mrs. Hudson and The Christmas Canary, Mrs Hudson and the Capricorn Incident, and Mrs Hudson and the Belladonna Inheritance. Those books let him blend classic detective pleasures with domestic detail, sly humor, and a warm interest in the people who usually stand just outside the spotlight.

Most of his fiction starts with historical fact, a true story, or an unexplained event. He is drawn to missing evidence, tangled loyalties, and the gap between the official version of things and what private lives are hiding. Even when the settings change, from Baker Street to the Caribbean or the medieval east, there is usually some vanished person, object, or truth pulling the story forward.

He still works as a consultant in the broadcasting industry, and he has said that he writes in longhand, often in cafes, on buses, or on Tube trains because he never really took to laptops. He has also travelled widely, including in the Middle East and India, and wrote parts of The Unicorn Road while travelling through Sicily. It suits him. His novels feel like the work of someone who likes movement, detours, and the odd clue picked up on the way.