Books in a Series: Reading Order Guides

Five series exist on the site: Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Father Brown, Superintendent Battle and the D’Artagnan romances. Eighteen books in total, and the list below gives them in publication order within each series, because that is the order the site’s series pages use.

Series reading order is not the same as chronological order. Holmes’s stories move around in time, the Poirot novels were written across forty years, and Dumas wrote Twenty Years After before he wrote the sequel that covers the earlier years. The book pages say which is which.

Every series book on this shelf

Eighteen titles across five series, in publication order.

Year	Title	Author	Form	Words	Reading time
1844	The Three Musketeers	Alexandre Dumas	Novel	226,061	13 h
1845	Twenty Years After	Alexandre Dumas	Novel	242,155	13 h
1887	A Study in Scarlet	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	43,000	2 h
1890	The Sign of the Four	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	43,000	2 h
1892	The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	106,000	6 h
1894	The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	94,259	5 h
1902	The Hound of the Baskervilles	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	59,000	3 h
1905	The Return of Sherlock Holmes	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	112,155	6 h
1911	The Innocence of Father Brown	G. K. Chesterton	Novel	78,220	4 h
1914	The Wisdom of Father Brown	G. K. Chesterton	Novel	71,782	4 h
1915	The Valley of Fear	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	57,665	3 h
1920	The Mysterious Affair at Styles	Agatha Christie	Novel	59,580	3 h
1923	The Murder on the Links	Agatha Christie	Novel	64,793	4 h
1925	The Secret of Chimneys	Agatha Christie	Novel	73,000	4 h
1926	The Murder of Roger Ackroyd	Agatha Christie	Novel	70,248	4 h
1927	The Big Four	Agatha Christie	Novel	55,601	3 h
1928	The Mystery of the Blue Train	Agatha Christie	Novel	70,132	4 h
1929	The Seven Dials Mystery	Agatha Christie	Novel	65,307	4 h

How this list was made

A title appears when its book page records a series key. Series keys come from the site’s own metadata, not from a catalogue number, so a book that is part of a sequence but not tagged as such stays off this list.

Lengths vary enormously inside one series: a Holmes collection runs 100,000 words, a Poirot novel 60,000.

The eighteen titles come from five series: Sherlock Holmes (seven books), Hercule Poirot (five), Father Brown (two), Superintendent Battle (two) and the D’Artagnan romances (two). All of them were written by four authors between 1844 and 1929. The two-book series are the ones to finish in a weekend; Holmes and Poirot need a month of evenings between them, and The Sign of the Four at 43,000 words is the shortest single volume on the shelf.

Questions readers ask

Should I read series in order?

For Holmes and Poirot, the order barely matters; each book stands alone. For D’Artagnan it matters a great deal: The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, then the Vicomte de Bragelonne, which is not yet on the site.

Where do I start with Poirot?

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 1920, is the first and the shortest way in. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926, is the one people argue about.

Why is there no Miss Marple?

Because her first novel appeared in 1930 and is not yet in the public domain in the United States. The shelf grows as titles do.

Part of all themed reading lists. Nearby shelves: Russian Classics · French Classics · American Classics · authors A–Z · word counts and reading times.