Brian Moore Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Brian Moore
Brian Moore was born August 25, 1921 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was an Irish novelist that immigrated to Canada and then to the United States. He grew up in a large family with eight siblings. His dad, named James Bernard Moore, was a prominent surgeon and the first Catholic to sit on the senate of Queen’s University, while his mom, Eileen McFadden Moore, was a farmer’s daughter from County Donegal, was a nurse.

He was known as a “writer’s writer”, composing novels that were quite different from one another in setting, voice, and incident however alike in their elegant, lucid, and vivid prose.

He is still probably the sole novelist to encapsulate life in Northern Ireland during the post-war era, including his exploration of the intercommunal divisions of The Troubles. Brian also demonstrated an unusual male insight into female psychology, with women being the central narrative character in several novels.

Brian, who was reared as a Roman Catholic, left from his homeland after he graduated from St. Malachy’s College in Belfast. He served in the British Ministry of War Transport during the Second World War, going to France, North Africa, and Italy.

In the year 1948 he went to Canada, where he worked different newspaper jobs, which includes being a reporter for the Montreal Gazette and became a Canadian citizen. It was during this time that he started writing fiction with an intent to publish. Even though he’d left Northern Ireland and abandoned his religious faith, he still wrote piercingly perceptive prose all about the restrictions of religion and the isolation of all individuals.

Moore penned his first novels while in Canada. These first books were thrillers, published either under his own name or under the pseudonyms Michael Bryan or Bernard Mara. The last of these thriller novels was published in the year 1958, and called “Intent to Kill”. The first two of these pieces of pulp fiction, all of which he would later disown were published by Harlequin in Canada, and called “Wreath for a Redhead” and “The Executioners”.

He lived in Canada from 1948 to 1958, and moved to New York in 1959 in order to take up a Guggenheim Fellowship and stayed there until he got divorced in 1967.

“Judith Hearne” is the novel that Moore regarded as his first and was the first that he produced outside of the thriller genre, is still among his most highly regarded. It was rejected by ten American publishers before at last getting accepted by a British publisher.

After he adapted “The Luck of Ginger Coffey” for a film in 1964, he moved out to California in order to work on the script for an Alfred Hitchcock film called “Torn Curtain”. He stayed in Malibu for the rest of his life, remarrying there and teaching at UCLA for a solid fifteen years. Even while living in California, he still spent part of each year in Canada, something he continued doing up until his death.

Brian was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the year 1975 and the first Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1987. He was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times.

“The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” was adapted into a film that starred Maggie Smith as the titular character. Moore’s other novels that were adapted include “The Luck of Ginger Coffey”, “Intent to Kill”, “Black Robe”, “The Statement”, “Catholics”, and “Cold Heaven”.

Brian was married twice. The first time was in 1952 to Jacqueline “Jackie” Sirois (nee Scully) a French Canadian and a fellow journalist with whom he had a son, named Michael who became a professional photographer. In October of 1967, they divorced and Jackie died in January of 1976. He married his second wife Jean Russell, who was a former commentator on Canadian television in October of 1967.

Brian died at his home in Malibu on January 11, 1999 at the age of 77 from pulmonary fibrosis.

“The Luck of Ginger Coffey” is a stand alone novel that was released in the year 1960. Ginger Coffey found Ireland to be much too small. No matter how hard he tried getting on, he just wound up being a glorified errand boy. This was why he emigrated to Canada with his daughter and wife, certain in the knowledge that there, his manifold talents would finally be recognized.

By the time he’s spent the passage money back home, and a top newspaper job just turned out to be reading proofs for a pittance and nothing more, he is ready to try anything. Even driving a van delivering fresh diapers to Montreal’s young moms, as well as picking up the dirty ones. After all, it’s just temporary. And things surely cannot get any worse. Or can they?

“Cold Heaven” is a stand alone novel that was released in the year 1983. When one appalling boating accident just off of the coast of Nice supposedly kills Dr. Alex Davenport, his attractive young wife, named Marie, finds she is in the ironic position of widow to a husband she had been planning on leaving for another man.

However Alex’s body vanishes suddenly from the morgue, and his passport and plane ticket have disappeared. So starts a mystery of hypnotic fascination, which involves elements of the supernatural and bizarre.

“The Color of Blood” is a stand alone novel that was released in the year 1987. Somewhere in an unnamed Eastern bloc country, somebody’s out to silence Cardinal Bern. Could it be the Secret Police, or is it, more shockingly, some fanatical Catholic activists that believe Bern, by keeping the peace between State and Church, has at last compromised himself too far?

Bern, who is barely able to escape an assassination attempt, gets abducted by anonymous and sinister men, and is spirited away to some safe house against his own will. Evading these unknown captors, he’s faced with a terrifying proposition: since he’s no longer sure of whom he is able to trust, he realizes that only he can avert this revolution which threatens to rip his country to pieces.