Richard Browning Books in Order

Richard Browning is very different from Cliff Hardy and Ray Crawley. These books are historical adventures with crime, show business, war, and a fair amount of comic self-invention. Browning is a tall Australian with a good face, a fast line, a crack shot's confidence, and a gift for being in the wrong place at exactly the wrong moment. He tells much of his own story from later life, which means the books have an extra layer of fun: you are never entirely sure whether Browning is confessing, boasting, or doing both at once.

The series starts around Browning's dream of getting into film-making, especially in Box Office Browning and Beverly Hills Browning. He wants a way into Hollywood and the life around it, but Peter Corris is far too mischievous to give him a simple rise-to-success story. Instead Browning drifts through bad marriages, dodgy deals, wartime complications, and the sort of opportunities that only look promising from a distance. By the time you get to books like Browning Takes Off, Browning P.I., and Browning Sahib, he has become a seasoned magnet for trouble.

The settings do a lot of work here. The books move through Australia, Hollywood, Depression-era California, wartime Sydney, London, and Ceylon. Real film-world figures slip through the pages, including Peter Finch, Vivien Leigh, and Howard Hughes, but the series never turns into a museum piece. Corris uses those backdrops to keep the stories lively, slightly off-balance, and full of schemes. Browning may have private investigator ties later on, but the larger pleasure is watching him improvise his way through a world of fame, danger, and ego.

He talks his way into trouble almost as often as he shoots his way out.

That tone matters. The Browning books are lighter on the surface than the Hardy novels, but they are not weightless. War, class, sex, money, and colonial power all sit just beneath the banter. Browning can be vain, lucky, selfish, charming, and oddly loyal, sometimes all in the same chapter. That makes him a more slippery lead than Hardy, but also a more playful one. You do not read these books for moral steadiness. You read them to see what sort of mess he creates, what sort of mess history creates around him, and whether he can wriggle free.

If you want Peter Corris at his most roguish, this is the series to try. It blends historical fiction, caper energy, and crime plotting without getting solemn about any of it. Read in order and Browning's long, dubious career becomes part of the joke, and part of the charm.