Peter Steiner Books in Order

Peter Steiner grew up in Cincinnati, and his working life has had a few clear chapters. He studied at the University of Miami, served in the Army in Germany, then earned a PhD in German literature from the University of Pittsburgh. For a time he taught German at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, which gave him a close, practical feel for how stories are built.

He came to cartooning early, and he traces it back to finding William Steig's The Lonely Ones as a child.

He drew for school papers, kept drawing through the Army and graduate school, and did cartoons even while he was a professor. But he did not become a full-time professional cartoonist until his forties. He sold his first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1979 and went on to spend decades drawing for that magazine and other publications.

That cartoon career gave him a wide audience, especially after his dog-at-the-computer cartoon became one of the best-known images of the early internet era. It also seems to have sharpened something readers notice in the novels: he likes clean lines, quick scenes, and stories that move without a lot of fuss.

Writing fiction came later, and it started in a personal place.

Steiner has said that teaching literature taught him how to take good writing apart and see its mechanics. When his father became terminally ill, he began keeping a journal for the first time. That journal gradually turned into a fictional father and son, and then into an unpublished novel. He liked the work so much that he kept going. Time spent in France pushed him toward the book that became A French Country Murder, later reissued as Le Crime, the first of his Louis Morgon novels.

The Morgon books show what Steiner does well. In A French Country Murder, L'Assassin, The Terrorist, The Resistance, and The Capitalist, he follows an older former intelligence man who wants a quiet life in rural France and keeps getting dragged back into danger. Readers who like these books tend to respond to the mix of village atmosphere, international politics, and moral unease. The hero has seen too much, but he still cannot quite stop caring.

Steiner later shifted from contemporary French-set intrigue to historical crime in Germany. The Good Cop introduces Willi Geismeier, an honest Munich detective trying to work through the chaos of the 1920s as fascism gains ground. The Constant Man, The Inconvenient German, and The New Detective keep following Willi through hiding, war, and the slow corruption of public life. These books are less about clever puzzles than about pressure, complicity, and resistance.

Across both series, some things stay constant. Steiner likes men and women who are pushed into hard moral choices. He cares about how institutions fail, how ordinary life absorbs political violence, and how a place, whether a French village or a Munich street, can shape the whole mood of a story. The painter's eye and the cartoonist's economy are both there.

He has continued to paint and draw while writing fiction, rather than dropping one craft for another. These days he has made his home in France and Connecticut. That split life feels fitting. His books are full of crossings, between countries, careers, and old selves.