Michael Russell Books in Order

If you want the full arc from the beginning: The City of Shadows → The City of Strangers → The City in Darkness
If you want the strongest mix of crime and espionage: The City of Lies → The City in Flames → The City Under Siege
If you want the later war years in Ireland and Europe: The City Underground → The City of God → The Dead City
If you want the final stretch of the series: The Dead City → The City in Year Zero

Michael Russell was born in England and grew up in an English-Irish family where stories of Ireland were part of everyday life. He has recalled a Donegal grandmother whose mantelpiece held both the Sacred Heart and Eamon de Valera, which tells you a lot about the mix of faith, politics, and memory around him as a child. Her tales of gunmen, priests, and the Blitz stayed with him for years, and later fed directly into his fiction.

Stories got to him early.

When he was seven, Russell contracted polio and spent months in an isolation hospital. He has said that the long stretch of enforced reading, with little else to do, was what turned him into both a serious reader and, eventually, a writer.

He studied English at Oxford, and his work there included Old Irish, Old English, and Middle Welsh. After university he spent three years doing farm work in North Devon, trying, in his own dry way, to get someone to pay him to write. It sounds like a detour, but it ended up shaping the next step.

His knowledge of farming helped him land a job on Emmerdale Farm, first as a script editor and later in more senior production roles. From there he built a long television career, writing or producing for shows including All Creatures Great and Small, The Bill, Between the Lines, Midsomer Murders, and A Touch of Frost. He has said that television taught him plenty about structure and pace, but also that one of its best lessons came from the smallest details, the everyday things that make a scene feel lived in.

Novels were the plan all along.

Living in Leeds during the Yorkshire Ripper murders also left a mark. Russell has said it made him uneasy with screen violence, especially violence towards women, and he once walked away from a commission because he did not want the story to dwell on the blow itself. That helps explain why his novels, even at their darkest, are usually more interested in motive, damage, and moral choice than in spectacle.

When Russell finally turned to fiction, he drew on the Irish history that had been with him since childhood and on the life he had built in Ireland. The result was The City of Shadows, the first Stefan Gillespie novel, followed by The City of Strangers, The City in Darkness, The City of Lies, and a long run of wartime books that carry Stefan from Dublin into Danzig, New York, Spain, London, Malta, Rome, and Berlin. Readers who like Russell tend to respond to that mix of murder mystery and espionage, but also to the way he keeps the books grounded in conscience, loss, divided loyalties, and the awkward facts of Irish neutrality.

He writes crime novels, but the puzzle is only part of the job. Again and again, he comes back to outsiders, to the pressure history puts on ordinary people, and to the ways family stories echo across decades. Even when the plot is moving fast, there is usually something more personal underneath it.

Russell moved to Ireland when his first wife, Joy, was producing Ballykissangel. He has said he once assumed he would return to England, but Wicklow became home. He now lives in west Wicklow with his family, close to the landscape that shapes so much of the Stefan Gillespie series.