Martin Woodhouse Books in Order

If you want Cold War spy tech: Tree Frog → Rock Baby → Mama Doll
If you want Renaissance adventure: The Medici Guns → The Medici Emerald → The Medici Hawks
If you want a lighter Caribbean caper: Phil & Me
If you want a later global thriller: Traders

Martin Woodhouse was born in Romford, Essex, in 1932, the son of a local doctor and a mother who wrote poetry. He spent his school years at Salisbury Cathedral School and Oundle, far enough from London to miss the worst of the Blitz, and that mix of science, books, and wartime Britain stayed with him.

At Cambridge he studied natural sciences at Downing College, then went on to St Mary's Hospital to train in medicine. He qualified, but never built a conventional medical career. Instead he drifted toward research, experimental psychology, and computers, and at the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit he designed and built a logic machine nicknamed Lettuce to compare human and machine intelligence.

He never stayed in one lane for long.

National service with the RAF pushed him deeper into aviation and engineering. He worked on aviation medicine, missile guidance, and control systems, experiences that later gave his fiction its unusual technical confidence. A few weeks before leaving the service, his younger brother Hugh asked for help writing scripts for Supercar, and Woodhouse said yes.

That yes changed the shape of his working life.

With Hugh, he wrote most of the first season of Supercar, then moved into British television more broadly. He became one of the writers on The Avengers, and his first script introduced Cathy Gale as John Steed's new partner. He also wrote for Emerald Soup, The Hidden Truth, The Protectors, The Man in Room 17, and Dr Finlay's Casebook, bringing science, menace, and a sly sense of humor into shows that could easily have become much more ordinary.

When he turned to novels, the same ingredients came with him. Tree Frog introduced Giles Yeoman, a scientist drawn into British intelligence games around a radar-proof drone, and it was followed by Rock Baby, Mama Doll, Blue Bone, and Moon Hill. Readers who click with Woodhouse tend to like the same things: smart people solving ugly problems, dry jokes in the middle of danger, and plots built around real machinery, research, or ideas rather than pure muscle.

He liked brainy heroes.

That shows up again in the Leonardo books he wrote with Robert Ross, The Medici Guns, The Medici Emerald, and The Medici Hawks. These novels turn a young Leonardo da Vinci into a problem-solver in Renaissance Italy, using art, engineering, and nerve to survive city-state politics, kidnappings, sieges, and war. Woodhouse also wrote standalones like Phil & Me, a Caribbean comic thriller, The Remington Set, published under the name John Charlton, and Traders, which moved into the world of Afghanistan and the arms trade.

His settings were rarely accidental. After the success of Tree Frog he spent time in Los Angeles, hoping to get the book filmed, and later lived in Barbados, Grenada, and Montserrat. Those places fed directly into his fiction, especially the later Yeoman books and the more sunlit, sea-going energy of Phil & Me.

In later years he moved back to Britain and changed direction again, working as a freelance programmer and system designer. He was also involved very early in electronic publishing through a company called Illumination, and later worked on the idea of a low-cost reader powered by sunlight. It suits him that even after medicine, military research, television, and novels, he was still trying something new. He died on 15 May 2011, leaving behind books that feel very much of their moment and a little ahead of it.