Stephen Done Books in Order

If you want the true starting point: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes → The Murder of Crows → The Torn Curtain
If you want a strong mid-series entry: The Marylebone Murders → The Last Train to Brackley Central
If you like seaside atmosphere and Liverpool settings: New Brighton Rock → Blood and Custard
If you want the later, darker cases: Cold Steel Rail → Murder in Broadway

Stephen Done was born in Redditch in 1960, but the places that seem to have stayed with him most are Scarborough and the Yorkshire coast. Railways were there from the start. One of his earliest photographs was taken at Filey station, and on his eighth birthday, while dressed in a Batman cape, he announced that he wanted to drive steam engines, only to learn that steam on British Rail was almost gone.

Steam never really left him.

Done studied fine art at what was then Leeds Polytechnic, then trained professionally as a curator, gaining his qualification from Leicester University in 1989. Before fiction took over, he built a museum career the old-fashioned way, by doing the work. At Bristol Industrial Museum he photographed a fading industrial world, learned more about historic machinery, fired and drove steam engines, and even sailed on a surviving steam tug on the Severn.

That mix of art, history, and machinery turned out to be useful.

He later worked at Cyfarthfa Castle Museum in Merthyr Tydfil, caring for Welsh art, ceramics, industrial history, and restored historic interiors. In 1997 he moved to Liverpool Football Club as museum curator, helping create the club museum from scratch and building a collection that tells more than a century of Liverpool history. He has also co-written reference books connected with the club, so his writing life did not begin with fiction alone.

The jump into crime novels came in 2005, when an idea for a railway mystery became Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. That first Inspector Vignoles novel introduced Detective Inspector Charles Vignoles and set the tone for what followed, postwar Britain, working railways, and crimes that grow out of ordinary lives under pressure. The book was successful enough to lead quickly to more cases, and it even had an early stage adaptation at a school.

His best-known books are the Inspector Vignoles mysteries, including Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, The Murder of Crows, The Last Train to Brackley Central, Cold Steel Rail, and Murder in Broadway. Readers tend to come for the murders and stay for the world around them. Done writes about stations, sidings, boarding houses, back streets, and railway offices with the eye of someone who has paid close attention to how places work, and how people move through them.

There is a lot going on beneath the period detail.

Across the series, he returns again and again to the hard years after the Second World War, rationing, damaged lives, close-knit working communities, and the strange mix of progress and loss that hung over Britain's rail network. His stories often balance police work with strong atmosphere, and he has room for both the big set piece, a train in snow, a smoggy canal, a frantic run across the country, and the quieter business of lies, loyalties, and small local secrets.

He still seems happiest around history that can be touched. These days he divides his time between the UK and Slovenia, and when he is not writing he paints, gardens, watches birds, and works on railway modelling projects. That feels fitting. Even after a career in museums and many books on the shelf, the old steam-era world is still there in his work, alive again every time Inspector Vignoles steps onto a platform.