Robert E Bailey Books in Order

Robert E. Bailey wrote private-eye stories from the inside out. Before publishing fiction, he spent five years as a corporate security director in Detroit and twenty years as a licensed private investigator. His day job meant surveillance, insurance fraud, employee theft, and the small practical problems that come with keeping people and property safe.

He also brought a military background to the work. Bailey was drafted during the Vietnam era and later retired from the service as a field-grade reserve officer. He was an award-winning combat pistol shot, but the details that show up most clearly in his books are usually the everyday ones: case files, bad leads, tight budgets, and people making messy decisions.

Writing had been his first love. An injury on the job eventually stopped him from working the street, so he returned to it with the experience he had gathered. That shift gave him a natural subject: investigators who know the rules, know the risks, and still have to make a living.

He knew a stakeout was rarely as tidy as it sounds.

His first novel, Private Heat, introduced Art Hardin, a retired counterintelligence officer turned private investigator in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The book won the Josiah W. Bancroft Award at the Florida First Coast Writer's Festival in 1998 and later became a finalist for the 2003 Shamus Award. Art is tough and observant, but Bailey made room for family, office routines, and the plain irritations of a PI's working day.

Bailey continued Hardin's cases in Dying Embers and Dead Bang. In the first, a missing-person job becomes a murder investigation that leaves Art under pressure from several sides. In the second, missing money and a family friend's trouble pull him into far bigger danger. The books keep the action moving, but they also show the working habits and local knowledge that make Art useful.

Bailey's approach was hardboiled but not all grim. Hardin is married, a parent, and someone whose home life matters when a case turns dangerous. That makes the series less about a lone detective floating through danger and more about the cost of taking the next job.

The risks don't stay at the office door.

Later, Bailey published The Small Matter of Ten Large, a short Art Hardin story that looks back at the detective's past. His final novel, Déjà Noir, shifts to Detroit and Raymond Kerze, an ex-cop and unlicensed PI whose attempt to help a desperate woman leads to mob trouble.

Bailey died in 2013. Déjà Noir was completed after his death with final editing by his wife, Linda Lyons-Bailey, and writer Joe Erhardt, then published in 2019. It is a last look at the kind of people Bailey liked to write about: bruised, funny, stubborn people who keep moving when life gets ugly.