Paul Tomlinson Books in Order

If you want a 1930s whodunit with stage magic: The Sword in the Stone-Dead → Murder by Magic → The Missing Magician
If you want funny space-outlaw adventures: Battleship Raider → A Fistful of Trouble → Road Rage → Bounty Hunter
If you want darkly comic fantasy: Slayer of Dragons → Fortune's Fool → Village of the Waking Dead
If you want writing craft books: Mystery → Suspense Thriller → Crime Thriller

Paul Tomlinson was born in Nottingham, England. He writes mystery, crime, science fiction, and fantasy, and he also writes practical books for people who want to build those kinds of stories themselves.

Before the novels and writing guides, he spent years around books in a different way. He is a qualified librarian, worked in academic libraries and the book trade, and later made a living as a freelance writer. For a long stretch he was the person in the office figuring out software well enough to write manuals and run in-house training, which helps explain why his craft books are so direct and methodical.

He was writing about genre long before he was publishing his own fiction. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he published articles and interviews in magazines such as Starburst and Starlog, including pieces on cyberpunk and William Gibson, and interviews with Terry Pratchett, Harry Harrison, and Guy Gavriel Kay.

That interest in science fiction history turned into a long-running Harry Harrison connection. Tomlinson's first short story appeared in the 1997 Eurocon and Octocon program book, the same event where he first interviewed Harrison on stage. He later compiled Harry Harrison: An Annotated Bibliography, published in 2002, and with Michael Carroll helped create and maintain Harry Harrison's official website and news blog.

He likes stories, but he also likes taking them apart to see how they work.

That practical streak shaped his path as an author. In a later interview he said he once assumed mystery plots would be easy to learn because they seemed so rule-bound, then discovered he did not really understand plot at all. Finding the eight-sequence model through screenwriting study was a turning point for him. He has said that before that discovery a novel could take him a year or two to write, while later he could get a first draft down much faster. Books like Mystery, Suspense Thriller, and Crime Thriller grew out of that approach. They focus less on vague inspiration and more on structure, genre conventions, and tools a writer can actually use.

His fiction started reaching readers in book form in 2016, when The Sword in the Stone-Dead became his first published novel and first self-published book. It was a good introduction to the sort of characters he returns to again and again: outsiders, tricksters, and unconventional investigators. The Great Vicari Mysteries follow former stage magician Benjamin Vickery, while Robot Wrecker brings that love of rogues and oddballs into a near-future science fiction thriller. In Slayer of Dragons and the wider Thurlambria books, he leans into comic fantasy, unreliable heroes, and a world where magic is coming back in awkward and dangerous ways. Then there is Battleship Raider and the rest of Outlaws of the Galaxy, which swap detectives for conmen, robots, bounty hunters, and a rough frontier planet. Readers who click with his work usually like the clean plotting, dry humor, and the way he wears his genre interests openly.

The screenplays are still waiting for their moment.

He has also written a number of screenplays, none of them produced, and he jokes about being bitter on that score. These days he continues to publish both fiction and writing guides, and he experiments with 3D software to create images connected to his stories. That mix fits him well. One side of his work loves the puzzle, the planning, and the bones of a genre. The other side loves thieves, magicians, robots, and trouble.