Rory Clements Bio

Born in Dover, Rory Clements grew up in a family with close links to the military; his great-grandfather served in the Crimea, and his grandfather and parents served in the First and Second World Wars respectively.

He was raised all over the world while his father served in the Royal Navy, an experience that went on to inspire his historical thrillers. That rootless, port-to-garrison upbringing gave him a feel for places where power and danger sit uncomfortably close together, and it is exactly those places where his fiction tends to live.

Before turning to fiction full-time, Clements had a long newspaper career, serving as features editor and associate editor of Today, editor of the Daily Mail’s Good Health Pages, and health editor at the Evening Standard. He has been writing full-time since 2007 (HarperCollins, 2023).

His debut novel arrived from an unlikely piece of research. He read the biography of the poet and martyr Robert Southwell and became intrigued by the little-known dark side of Elizabeth I’s golden age, particularly the fiendish Richard Topcliffe, the Queen’s priest-hunter, and the many plots against the Queen’s life foiled repeatedly by her spy chiefs Walsingham and Robert Cecil. All he needed was a hero. He wanted someone with modern sensibilities, considered the obvious name of William Shakespeare, and then discovered the playwright’s missing older brother, John.

In 2009, Clements published his debut novel, Martyr, the first in his historical mystery series centred on Elizabethan England’s John Shakespeare. His six acclaimed novels in that series, Martyr, Revenger, Prince, Traitor, The Heretics, and The Queen’s Man, follow Elizabeth’s intelligencer John Shakespeare, brother to the playwright William, through the dark underworld of Tudor England as he unmasks traitors and conspirators who plot against the Queen. The series earned Clements immediate recognition: he won the Crime Writers’ Association Ellis Peters Historical Fiction Award in 2010 for Revenger (Crime Writers’ Association, 2010), and was shortlisted for CWA Awards for Martyr, Prince, and The Heretics.

After seven years in the Elizabethan world, Clements made a deliberate shift in period. His second series opens with Corpus (2016), set in 1936, and follows Cambridge history professor Tom Wilde, who is drawn into a world of treachery, espionage, conspiracy, and murder. The series covers the years leading up to and during the Second World War, following Wilde’s adventures as a Cambridge professor and secret agent who must navigate the treacherous waters of wartime espionage and intrigue. The second Tom Wilde novel, Nucleus, brought Clements his second major award: in 2018 he won the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Fiction Award again with the Second World War thriller Nucleus (Crime Writers’ Association, 2018). The Tom Wilde series currently runs to eight novels, from Corpus (2016) through Nucleus, Nemesis, Hitler’s Secret, A Prince and a Spy, The Man in the Bunker, The English Führer, and A Cold Wind From Moscow (2025).

In 2024 Clements launched a third series. In Munich Wolf, a standalone crime novel set in 1930s Munich, Detective Sebastian Wolff must walk a tight line between doing his job and falling foul of the Nazi party he despises. Wolff, a veteran of the First World War, is a detective in Munich’s criminal police (the Kripo) and vehemently anti-Nazi, struggling to adapt to the new normal of the regime. What began as a standalone has since expanded: the Sebastian Wolff series now includes Munich Wolf (2024), Evil in High Places (2025), and Invitation from a Dictator. Author Conn Iggulden has described Wolff as ‘the Inspector Morse of pre-war Germany’, while the Sunday Times called Clements ‘a worthy successor to Philip Kerr’, whose Bernie Gunther crime novels occupy the same shadow-world of Nazi Germany (Penguin Books, 2026).

Invitation from a Dictator is the third book in the Detective Sebastian Wolff series, published by Viking in August 2026. Set in Munich in 1937, it sees the Duke and Duchess of Windsor arrive in Germany for a meeting at Hitler’s mountain retreat, while a ruthless Communist group called Red Freedom has brought fear and bloodshed to the area. Detective Wolff is charged with protecting the visitors, but the conflict between his job and his principles grows more complicated when he realises who leads Red Freedom: Ulrike, his first love and the mother of his son.

Across all three series, Clements works within the same broad concerns: how ordinary people operate under political pressure they did not choose, where personal loyalty collides with institutional duty, and what it costs a principled person to function inside a corrupted system. The period changes while the questions stay constant. He lives in a seventeenth-century farmhouse in Norfolk and writes full-time. He is married to the artist Naomi Clements-Wright.

John Shakespeare Books in Order

The complete John Shakespeare series, in publication order:

1. Martyr (2009)

2. Revenger (2010)

3. Prince (2011)

4. Traitor (2012)

5. The Heretics (2013)

6. The Queen’s Man (2014)

7. Holy Spy (2015)

Tom Wilde Books in Order

The complete Tom Wilde series, in publication order:

1. Corpus (2016)

2. Nucleus (2018)

3. Nemesis (2019)

4. Hitler’s Secret (2020)

5. A Prince and a Spy (2021)

6. The Man in the Bunker (2022)

7. The English Führer (2023)

8. A Cold Wind From Moscow (2025)

Sebastian Wolff Books in Order

The Sebastian Wolff series, in publication order:

1. Munich Wolf (2024)

2. Evil in High Places (2025)

3. Invitation from a Dictator (2026)