Jeremiah Healy Books In Order

Publication Order of John Francis Cuddy Books

Publication Order of John Francis Cuddy Collections

Publication Order of Mairead O'Clare Legal Mystery Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Deadly Allies Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Jeremiah Healy was an American detective mystery author best known for the “John Francis Cuddy” series of thrillers. Healy was a former military police captain and sheriff’s officer. He went to Rutgers College and proceeded to Harvard, where he studied law and went on to practice and teach at the New England School of Law in Boston for nearly two decades. His debut novel was “Blunt Darts”, which first came out in 1984. The lead in the novel was one of detective fiction’s most favorite characters, John Francis Cuddy, a private investigator who plies his trade in Boston. Cuddy is violent though moral and honest man, who solves cases that the judicial system has failed to deal with. The character has made it into most of Healy’s novels and collections short stories, fifteen of which have won or made the shortlist for the Shamus Award. With Healy achieving so much success in the genre, he served as International Association of Crime Writers President during the eighties, and headed the Private Eye Writers of America at one time. He has also been a chair of the Edgar and Shamus Award committees and been on the Mystery Writers of America National Board of Directors. He has also given speeches on crime mystery writing at the Boston Globe Book Festival, the Literature Series at the Smithsonian Institute, and the Sorbonne in Paris among several other conferences and workshops. Several of his novels have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and French. He committed suicide in 2014 after a long battle with alcoholism and clinical depression.

Jeremiah Healy first got into writing while he was a professor at the New England School of Law. Even as he loved the teaching profession, he knew that he needed to find a complement to his mundane life. As a teacher, he felt like a performer when he wanted to be a creator, who could sit by himself and come up with something that others could consume without needing him in the room. He started writing his first novel “Blunt Darts” during this time but found that the pressure of teaching combined with writing was taking a huge toll on him. While his mysteries were well-received and he had the rare privilege of having two careers, he had no life and knew he had to quit one if he was to become great at the other. Given that writing had more upside than teaching, which only depended on his experience as a trial lawyer, he quit to pursue a professional writing career. He had served as an MP Lieutenant before his lawyering and teaching days, and hence writing a thriller novel came easy to him. Even as he had never served overseas, he made his lead character a combination of his uncle who had been an insurance investigator and his father who just like him had served as an MP Captain during the Vietnam War. He made Cuddy a post-Vietnam War veteran as he needed to remedy the portrayal of a veteran as a mentally detective person, when in fact some vets successfully compartmentalized their experiences and went on to live normal lives.

John Francis Cuddy the lead in the series is a man of Irish roots that went to Holy Cross College, a Jesuit School where he got the foundations for his strong moral and ethical standards. He served as an MP in Vietnam before he came back to the United States, where he becomes a private investigator. His specialty is taking up cases that the bureaucratic justice system seems to have missed. His strong moral compass can be a hindrance as well as a driver in his work. Cuddy spends a lot of time at his wife’s grave discussing his dilemmas and cases with her. In all the novels, Healy writes a careful combination of mean street elements with a whodunit, to provide insights into the Boston metropolis and the lead’s stagnant relationship with the Assistant D.A. After he finished the Cuddy novels, he wrote “The Stalking Of Sheila Quinn” a standalone novel that featured a client that targeted his attorney. As Terry Devane, he wrote the “Mairead O’Clare” series between 2001 and 2003, and another 60 short stories that won him nine Shamus awards. The novels are tightly constructed and briskly paced novels with varied and rich characters, offering insights into a variety of professional and social environments.

“Blunt Darts” the first novel in the series is an explosive introduction to John Francis Cuddy the lead character of the John Francis Cuddy series of novels. Cuddy is a recently widowed Vietnam veteran who has just lost his job at the insurance company. He has set up on his own and opened his own private investigations firm, though he drinks too much for a man in his mid-thirties. Lately he has been getting his act together and has even got himself hired to find the missing fourteen-year-old grandson of a wealthy woman in the town. Initial investigations indicate that the boy may have run away rather than been kidnapped, given his experience in the woods and his reputation as a very smart boy. The young man has endured much trauma having lost his mother and uncle before spending some time in a mental health facility. Oddly, it seems no one care about the boys welfare with his father, a leading judge in the city more concerned with protecting his name rather than getting his son back safe. The judge is frustrating the case and has employed a fixer/bodyguard to ensure people like Cuddy do not make any headway.

“The Staked Goat” is an excellent novel that takes John Francis back to his days of serving as MP in Vietnam. During the war, he had been great friends with Al Sachs with whom he has patrolled the dangerous streets of Saigon. More than ten years later, he is a PI toughing it out on the mean back streets of Boston. He is rudely interrupted from a deep sleep when the phone starts ringing at 7 am. His old friend Sachs is on the other end of the line asking that they meet and catch up later in the evening. He accepts to go to the meet but Sachs never shows up. The next morning Cuddy gets Sachs’s address and arrives at his place to find it crawling with police officers and paramedics. His friend’s body had been found mangled and naked with the pinkie finger broken. Just then, he remembers that while in Saigon, Sachs used to say jokingly that he would crush his pinkie finger if he was ever captured by enemy agents, to let him know that his death was not accidental. He now needs to travel back to Vietnam and unearth a dark military conspiracy in a war that he thought was all but finished.