The Ronnie and Bernard Adventures Books in Order

The Ronnie and Bernard Adventures are affectionate, silly, slightly spooky stories set in 1970s Britain. At the centre are two actors whose careers and personalities pull in opposite directions. Ronnie is loud, vain, old-fashioned and usually one bad decision away from disaster. Bernard is smarter, sadder and more likely to see trouble coming, even if he still walks straight into it. Together they make a classic odd couple, one part showbiz double act, one part survival team.

Nothing about these books is meant to be solemn.

In The Crooked Line, the pair are stars of an afternoon ITV soap in 1972 when Bernard gets a strange chance at an inheritance. To claim his uncle's estate, he and Ronnie have to spend the night in a country house. From there the book slides happily into comic mystery. Strange apparitions appear, an ancient stone circle starts to matter, and the house turns out to be hiding a route into the past and future. The whole thing feels like a crossroads between a haunted house caper and a time-slip adventure, with plenty of bickering along the way.

The Haunted Theatre keeps the same energy but moves the story to a faded seaside resort. After their soap is cancelled, Bernard gets a promising new job and Ronnie tags along, hoping his own career is not quite finished yet. A Christmas pantomime, a pier-end theatre, rumours about a vanished music hall performer and a fresh time trap give the sequel a slightly different flavour. The setting matters a lot here. Ayres clearly enjoys old British showbiz, and the theatre lets him pile on backstage chaos, ghost-story atmosphere and comic misunderstanding in equal measure.

What makes the series fun is the balance. The plots have supernatural and science fiction elements, but the books are driven more by character than by rules. Ronnie and Bernard are not expert investigators or polished heroes. They are performers, worriers, blaggers and, quite often, the authors of their own problems. Ronnie tends to charge ahead with terrible instincts. Bernard spends more time trying to hold the thing together. That rhythm gives the books their pace.

The wider appeal is the 1970s backdrop. These novels are full of television culture, seaside showbiz, old-school attitudes and a deliberately exaggerated sense of period British comedy. Ayres has described the series as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to 1970s culture, and that is exactly how it reads. There is affection in the parody. If you know the mood of old comedy films, spooky family adventures and slightly tatty regional television, you will recognise the atmosphere straight away.

Even with the jokes, there are real stakes. Careers are slipping, the past is not stable, and both men keep landing in places they do not understand. If The Time Bubble is Ayres's bigger, more emotional science fiction saga, The Ronnie and Bernard Adventures is the looser, funnier cousin. Start with The Crooked Line, then move to The Haunted Theatre for more of the same odd, amiable chaos.