Harry Bingham books in order

Three sons. One fortune. Who will win it?

A wealthy Yorkshire industrialist dies and leaves his three sons and one daughter, all used to a life of extreme luxury! absolutely nothing. Except the chance to win the entire inheritance by whichever one of them has one million pounds in his bank account at the end of three years. 

Startled out of their indulgent lives, the three sons start competing against each other in their mad attempt to make a million pounds. Two of them go into the City, the eldest buys a run-down factory. Which one of them is going to be successful in their desperate bid and win the millions?

A young scientist, Cameron, has an idea which could revolutionize medicine. She believes that, once published, her findings will change the world.

A maverick financier, Bryn, sees the potential, but convinces her that truth alone is never what secures change: it’s money, nous and competitive savvy.

He persuades her to go into business with him. Their aim: to build a stockmarket company worth a hundred million pounds – big enough to survive assault; strong enough to market Cameron’s technology to the entire world.

Corinth, a corporation worth a hundred billion dollars, sees Cameron’s technology as a threat and aims to wipe out the fledgling enterprise.

The story becomes a race to the stockmarket – and a battle to survive.

Two brothers, a savage quarrel - and the race to find oil

Alan Montague and Tom Creeley are brought up like brothers, but Alan is heir to the great estate of Whitcombe House, while Tom is merely the gardener's son. Best of friends, in the trenches of the First World War, the two men quarrel and are separated.

Best friends, now bitter enemies

The two men survive the war, and their thoughts turn to their childhood passion: the quest for oil. Alan seeks it in the wild mountains of the Persian Zagros. Tom emigrates to America and searches in the hills of California, the scrub of East Texas.

Fortune, failure - and a final meeting

As the years pass, both men meet success or failure. And when another war dawns, the Allied forces face the greatest logistical challenge in the history of warfare - and after almost three decades apart, the two men must finally meet again.

NB: Co-authored with Nuala Bingham.

Abe Rockwell and Willard T. Thornton are famous fighter pilots together in World War I. Willard returns to a hero’s welcome in America and launches a film career. Abe just wants to fly – and he has no rich family to support him.

When he crash lands in small-town Georgia, the locals recognize Abe and appeal to him for help. Alcohol-smuggling gangsters are trying to oust them from their own homes. But Abe can’t see that his one patched-up aircraft can make much difference.

Slowly, a plan forms and Abe needs help himself. Enter another tremendously skilled pilot – but it’s a woman. Abe doesn’t want to take her on, but she’s the best there is and brave with it. Neither of them can predict exactly what they’ve let themselves in for.

Willard, meanwhile, forsakes films for banking and rises fast – only to uncover some very dodgy business at the core of the company. He’d like to turn a blind eye but eventually he’s in so deep that he can’t. The firm is under serious threat, from a devious and resourceful attacker. Which is when Willard realizes who it must be, and how he’s going to have to team up with someone he’d always overlooked.

Misha is an aristocratic young officer in the army when the Russian revolution sweeps away all his certainties. Tonya is a nurse from an impoverished family in St Petersburg. They should have been bitter enemies; and yet they fall passionately in love. It cannot last, and Misha must flee the country as Tonya faces arrest and possibly death.

Thirty years later, Misha has survived the War and seeks to rebuild his life in the destroyed city of Berlin. Drawn into spying for the British, he learns of a talented female agent from the Soviet quarter. Can it be his lost love? And how will they find each other, as the divide deepens between East and West?

A woman reports a crime to the police, with unexpected results

The grieving widow who finds that she's about to lose more than just her husband

When a man attempts the perfect murder, it's not quite as easy as he thinks

Two men in prison play a deadly game of Scrabble

A young woman tries to trick an old man and gets more than she bargained for

Sometimes crimes are solved in ways you can't explain

A murderer about to be hanged finds that's not the worst thing that can happen

You never know who's going to turn up at your door

NB: Original stories from Mark Billingham, Clare Mackintosh, James Oswald, Jane Casey, Angela Marsons, Harry Bingham, Antonia Hodgson and CL Taylor - specially written for Quick Reads.

A crime you'll always remember, A detective you'll never forget.

A young prostitute lies dead in a Cardiff squat. Her six-year-old lies dead beside her. It looks like an ordinary murder scene . . . except that a millionaire's platinum bank card lies among the debris. How did it come to be there? And is there more to this case than meets the eye?

Investigating the case is rookie Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths - a new recruit with a reputation for being deadly smart, more than ordinarily committed . . . and unsettlingly odd. As she starts to follow up the clue left by that platinum bank card, she finds the disturbing hints that suggest a truly appalling crime has been committed - and release the demons of her own dark past.

A tale of snow, love - and multiple murder.

A human leg is discovered in a suburban freezer. The victim is a teenage girl killed some ten years earlier. But then other body parts start appearing. And these ones are male, dark-skinned, and very fresh . . .

British detective Fiona Griffiths starts to investigate, in the midst of the coldest winter on record. Up in a remote cottage in the Welsh Black Mountains, she finds the data that contains the clue to the entire mystery . . . but, as the first snow starts to fall, she discovers that she's not alone.

Fiona Griffiths's toughest case yet: alone, undercover, scared.

A woman starved to death in a remote Welsh cottage. A computer guy left to bleed to death, his hands brutally hacked off at the wrist.

When DC Fiona Griffiths and her colleagues realize they're staring at one of the world's most audacious robberies, she's asked to take on the challenge: will she go undercover to penetrate this criminal gang from within?

When Fiona says yes, she has to give up her old life entirely. She becomes Fiona Grey, a homeless woman struggling to get her life back together again. When the criminal gang adopt her as one of their own, she's totally alone, vulnerable - and dangerous as hell.

A hanged man. A stolen painting. An impossible crime.

A marine engineer is found hanged in a locked apartment. Some artwork is stolen, then mysteriously returned. And a security guard is found dead at the base of a Welsh cliff.

When Fiona Griffiths is tasked to look through a stackload of cold cases, her bosses don't expect her to find anything of interest. But then she discovers that an impossible robbery really happened. That the supposed suicide was anything but. That the dead security guard was almost certainly murdered.

Before long, Fiona is embroiled in what will become the most terrifying case of her career so far - one that forces her to enter the heart of darkness, and a journey that will test her mental toughness to its very limits.

Midnight in a country churchyard. A corpse lying at peace.

The dead woman looks totally peaceful and there are no marks of violence. But why is she here, in this remote spot? Why does no one come forward to identify her? And why is she wearing a thin white dress on this howling October night?

When young Welsh police sergeant Fiona Griffiths starts to investigate, her enquiries take her to a quiet monastery buried deep in the Welsh hills. And when she finds that a young teenager from the area went missing a few years earlier, her anxieties start to deepen.

In a terrifying denouement - with echoes of Edgar Allan Poe - Fiona discovers the true horror of this crime . . . and she risks becoming its very next victim.

An ancient battle. A dead researcher. And a very modern crime.

It's been more than a year since Detective Sergeant Fiona Griffiths had any sort of murder case . . . when all of a sudden, she gets the call. A local archaeologist has been found bloodily murdered. Her head severed from her body. Her eyes apparently fixed on a fragment of Latin text.

The crime seems to summon the ghosts of Dark Age Britain - and the shade of King Arthur.

But why are those ancient enmities alive once again? Why are armed burglars raiding remote country churches? And how many more people will die before these clues are unraveled?

Fiona thinks she knows the answers to these questions . . . but the crime that underlies them all is so utterly unexpected, so breathtakingly audacious in its execution, that it hasn't yet been committed.

So: you’ve written a book and you want to get it published.

That means you need to know about getting your manuscript prepped for submissions. You need to know about literary agents, and query letters, and synopses, and book proposals.

You need to know what happens if an agent comes back with an acceptance - and what happens if they say, ‘I liked it, but …’

You need to know about agent contracts as well as publishing contracts. And you need to know about the market for books, because that’s the market which will determine your future as a writer.

But that’s not all. You need to know about how to work with publishers though editing, design, marketing and publicity. What publishers want from those processes isn’t always the same as what YOU want and you have to know when to play nice and when to insist on changes. You have to understand what you can do to market your books effectively – and in a way that works for the person you are.

All of that in a publishing market that’s been changing faster than any time in history.

And look: you’re a reader as well and you don’t want a tedious textbook crammed with wholesome but indigestible facts. You want a book that feels like a friendly, authoritative and humorous companion on your journey.

Finally, you want (and need) the voice of experience. The voice of an author who has been much published himself – and someone who (as boss of Jericho Writers) has helped thousands of writers on their journey to publication.

So: you want to write a book.

That means you’ll need to learn how to find the market you’ll be writing for and how to plan your novel. Know what works and what doesn’t and identify the ‘outstanding’ from the ‘good’ ideas.

You’ll need to know how to plot like the experts: learn about all the plotting methods open to you, and which one suits you and your writing style.

You’ll also want to know who your characters are and why they’re the way they are. You’ll need to know about character arcs and character development, so that you can create dazzling characters that’ll leave your readers captivated.

But none of that will mean anything, if you haven’t developed your prose style. This is what separates ‘people who like to write’ and ‘writers.’ So, you’ll need to learn how to handle technicalities like point of view, tense, omniscience, writing with clarity, and the art of showing-not-telling.

And, because you’re a writer whose just created a world filled with evocative characters and excellent descriptions of place, you’ll also need to know how to edit. Really edit your manuscript so that it’s ready for publication.

Oh, and yes, you’ll need experience. This book is written by someone who knows what he’s talking about. With 20+ years as a published and bestselling author, Harry has helped thousands of writers on their journey to publication (as boss of Jericho Writers).

And look: there are plenty of writing manuals out there, but with this book Harry will be with you from the very first sentence to the last full stop. Offering you actionable advice with real-life examples, all with the aim to help you write a book to be proud of. From one writer to another – good luck.

Celebratory, witty and incredibly insightful, Harry Bingham explores the eccentricities and customs of the British nation in a bid to answer a question which has everyone debating – Who are we?

For the British, ‘Who are we?’ is an oddly difficult question. Although our national self-assessment usually notes a number of good points (we’re inventive, tolerant and at least we’re not French), it lists a torrent of bad ones too. Our society is fragmented and degenerate. Our kids are thugs, our workers ill-educated, our public services abysmal. We drink too much. Our house prices are crazy, our politicians sleazy, our roads jammed, our football team rubbish. When ‘The Times’ invited readers to suggest new designs for the backs of British coins, one reader wrote in saying, ‘How about a couple of yobs dancing on a car bonnet or a trio of legless ladettes in the gutter?’

Is there really nothing to be proud of? British inventors have been responsible for myriad marvels we now take for granted, from the steam engine to the world wide web. British medical and public health innovations – vaccination, integrated mains sewerage, antiseptic surgery – have saved far more lives than all other medical innovations put together. And why stop there? The British empire covered a quarter of the earth’s surface but used an army smaller than that of Switzerland to exert its rule. The world speaks our language. 

Our scientists have won vast numbers of Nobel Prizes. The evolution of ‘habeas corpus’, trial by jury and the abolition of torture aren’t purely British in inspiration, but owe more to us than to anyone else. Our parliamentary democracy has been hugely influential in spreading ideals of liberty and representative government round the world.

A counter-blast to the bashing of capitalism and a fresh and bold re-evaluation of the fundamentals that turn genius into hard currency.

Harry Bingham used to be an economist and a banker and thought he understood money. Then, in autumn 2008, the world stood on the edge of calamity and Harry realized that all the things he knew had been proven utterly wrong.

So, he decided to go back to first principles, to meet the people who make the money - the entrepreneurs and inventors, the salesmen and financiers. He wanted to find out how the world really worked and what drives the people who make it spin. For the first time he saw that while the economy might be about many things, it is never ever about money.

We all have strong feelings about money. It is the magic of its alchemy that has catapulted the human race from extreme poverty to our world of ever-expanding riches, but it also brings with it economic chaos. But how many of us can say what is it made really made of and how it works?

From billionaire entrepreneurs and Indian shift-workers to small-time manufacturers and conglomerate CEOs, The Root of All Good, is the story of the people who have created the world of extraordinary prosperity that we now live in, and the new system of capitalism they are shaping to recover our future.

It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way-- Ernest Hemingway

This book will tell you how to write novels and narrative non-fiction for publication. It is not a creative writing textbook, but teaches the core skills of story-telling: story, character, prose style, and a whole host of attendant tools that you'll need in order to be successful and to please your agent, publisher and audience. It is designed for any novelist, or narrative non-fiction author, no matter what their genre or interest.

How to Write is written by an author has enjoyed success with six novels so far, and three non-fiction titles. Harry Bingham has been in the bestseller lists, has received generous advances and has been nominated for awards. But most importantly Harry is an author who understands the needs of writers. He is the founder of the Writers' Workshop, which works intensively with new writers giving feedback and advice on their work, and helping many to publication. 

This book is a condensed version of all that he has learned in teaching and working with writers. If your prose style lets you down, then your characterisation will be impoverished, and if your plot is mechanical, then your book's sense of place and time will feel stagey and unconvincing.

If you're at an early stage in your writing journey, then some parts of this book will strike you as illuminating and essential. If you come back to it later on, then other passages will glow with meaning. It is manual dense with techniques, tools and tips that will kick start your writing career.

The birth in 1776 of American Independence created a new template for the modern world: the launch of Democracy 1.0, if you like.

But that great creation was not without antecedents. Indeed, the Anglo-Saxon tradition by which a king consulted his people stretches so far back in time that we can't even locate its origin. With the passing centuries, that tradition strengthened and deepened until, by the end of the 1400s, the English Parliament was the most powerful in Europe. More remarkable still, it boasted a wholly elected lower house (roughly equivalent to the House of Representatives), and those elected representatives would exercise an iron grip over the laws and taxes of the land.

That old English tradition was cranky, piecemeal, improvised and imperfect - yet it was that tradition which the Founding Fathers drew on when they came to draw up the US Constitution.

This short and entertaining book looks at the historical antecedents of various aspects of the US democratic tradition, arguing that if the United States gave the world a template for Democracy 1.0, then English history in the centuries prior offers a glimpse of the beta-release version of that software: infuriating, full of bugs, yet with startling potential.

The book will appeal to those interested in American History and/or English History, with a particular emphasis on the medieval and early-modern periods.

If we really wanted to sell you this book, we’d tell you that it’s packed full of useful advice on writing, editing, getting published and marketing your books.

Which is true, admittedly, except that 52 LETTERS also tells you all about the world’s oldest book.

And how to swear in Orcadian (which is a genuine Scottish dialect, unless you prefer to think of it as degenerate Norse, but either way it’s not the world’s most useful language, for swearing or anything else.)

And the book talks about the story you’ve left, and the story you love, and how you have to fall forwards into the book you’re writing now.

And it tells you about mindset mathematics and how to alter your perceptions of what is possible as a writer.

And it tells you why the new management of Barnes & Noble actually means something quite challenging for traditional publishing.

And it talks about all the ways that the publishing industry can treat writers crappily and it offers some helpful advice on how to avoid that kind of treatment yourself.

And it talks about the power of detail and actually gives you some examples which make you think, ‘Yes, I really understand something there and I want to go away right now to put that good advice into practice.’

And just when you think the book is going to stay really grown up and useful and good for you, it’ll unwrap a parcel of darlings and share them with you. Then ask you for darlings of your own and spend time with those too.

Then it’ll talk about the origins of the novel and be puzzled about agents who have set their hearts against speculative fiction.

So by this time, you’ll be thinking that the book is definitely entertaining but it can’t really call itself useful, except then you read something about the simplest technique in fiction (and one that always works), so you decide, dammit, that the book must be entertaining and useful.