Wilkie Martin Books in Order

If you want the main series from the start: Inspector Hobbes and the Blood → Inspector Hobbes and the Curse → Inspector Hobbes and the Gold Diggers
If you want to keep going with Hobbes: Inspector Hobbes and the Bones → Inspector Hobbes and the Common People
If you want a darker standalone: Razor
If you want something short and silly: Relative Disasters

Wilkie Martin was born in Nottingham and went to school in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham. He later studied Agricultural Science at the University of Leeds, though he has joked that beer and rock and roll were part of the education too. These days his fiction is closely tied to the Cotswolds, where he has lived and worked for more than 30 years.

Place matters to him. The villages, lanes, pubs, and half-familiar corners of the Cotswolds feed directly into his books, especially the fictional Sorenchester of the Unhuman novels, a twisted cousin of Cirencester.

He came to writing the long way round.

Martin has said he loved stories from the moment he learned to read, and as a child he especially liked the chance to make up his own. Work and a serious interest in scuba diving took over for years, and he wrote very little for a long stretch. Then he noticed creative writing classes at his local college, signed up, enjoyed them, and decided writing was what he wanted to do.

That decision led to Inspector Hobbes. Martin has explained that the character began as a short story after he saw a television segment that made him wonder what it would look like if a not quite human being passed unnoticed through ordinary modern life. Because Hobbes was hard to write from the inside, Martin gave him a narrator, the accident-prone Andy Caplet, a local reporter who fills a Dr Watson role while bringing plenty of chaos of his own.

The result is a very unusual detective series.

Many readers first meet Martin through Inspector Hobbes and the Blood, where Andy gets pulled into a crime wave and discovers that some locals are far from ordinary. Inspector Hobbes and the Curse leans into dead sheep, vanished pheasants, and something nasty in the woods. Inspector Hobbes and the Bones brings in floods, blackmail, and local corruption, while Inspector Hobbes and the Common People opens the world out with property schemes, mountain dangers, and fresh mysteries back in the Cotswolds. Across the series, readers tend to come for the odd detective pair, the dry humour, the puns, and the steady stream of memorable food.

Martin has also written the standalone Razor, a darker but still offbeat fantasy thriller about grief, guilt, and a man trying to force himself into a heroic death. On a lighter track, he published Relative Disasters, a small book of silly verse, and he has written children's books under the name Wilkie J. Martin. The first Hobbes novel was shortlisted for the Impress Prize for New Writers, and the audiobook editions later picked up awards of their own.

Away from the page, he has long been a scuba diver and diving instructor, and he is known for being a keen shark watcher. He has also spoken about his love of cooking, music, books, and curries, all of which feel very much at home in his fiction. Mrs Goodfellow's generous meals are not there by accident.

Martin is based in the Cotswolds and still seems closely linked to the landscape that shaped his books. He remains part of the local writing community through the Catchword writers' group in Cirencester, and his stories keep returning to the same appealing idea, that ordinary English life can look perfectly normal right up to the moment something very odd steps out from behind it.