Saxon Books in Order

The Saxon books take Les Roberts back to Los Angeles and into a very different mood from the Cleveland novels. These are private eye stories with one foot in Hollywood and the other in the city's rougher streets. The hero, Saxon, is an actor who moonlights as a detective, which gives the series its built-in tension. He knows performance, image, and make-believe, but the cases keep dragging him toward what is real.

That setup lets Roberts move comfortably between boardrooms, studio lots, bars, apartments, and late-night corners of the city. The glamour is there, but it is never the whole point. Saxon spends as much time dealing with hustlers, drifters, bad bargains, and washed-up dreamers as he does with famous people. Los Angeles in these books is not just shiny or cynical. It is both at once.

Saxon himself fits that world well. He has the wisecracks and instincts you want from a classic private eye, but he is not all pose. Again and again Roberts gives him a softer center than the usual hard guy detective. He notices people who get ignored. He gets pulled into cases because he cannot quite leave them alone. That helps keep the series from turning into pure show-business satire.

Across the books, Roberts uses the entertainment world as a pressure cooker. In An Infinite Number of Monkeys and Not Enough Horses, Saxon moves through Hollywood ambition, television politics, and suspicious deaths that the police either cannot or will not settle cleanly. Later books widen his world. Seeing the Elephant sends him back to Chicago after the death of a boyhood friend, while The Lemon Chicken Jones pairs him with his adopted son Marvel in a case that starts with a vanished mail-order bride and opens into something much uglier.

That growing sense of makeshift family matters. Even when Saxon is working alone, the series is interested in who gets left behind by the city and who decides to care anyway. Marvel's presence in the later books gives the stories extra warmth and a slightly broader emotional range. The banter is still there, and so is the danger, but the books feel more lived in because Saxon is not sealed off from everyone around him.

If you like older private eye fiction but want a series with Hollywood mileage, street-level detail, and a lead who can be both tough and unexpectedly generous, Saxon is a good place to start. Read from An Infinite Number of Monkeys onward if you can. The cases stand alone, but the gradual widening of Saxon's world is part of the fun.