The Isaac Bell Adventures: A Complete Guide to Cussler's Period Thriller Series
April 24, 2026
Clive Cussler spent most of his career writing large-scale contemporary thrillers — Dirk Pitt diving on lost ships, the NUMA Files, the Oregon Files. Then in 2007, he did something different. He went back to the early 1900s and created Isaac Bell.
The result is the most historically grounded work in the Cussler catalogue: a period adventure series set across the Progressive Era and the dawn of the twentieth century, following one of fiction’s most capable and underrated detectives.
Fourteen books later, the series is still running — now under a different hand, but with the same engine.
Who Is Isaac Bell?
Isaac Bell is a senior detective at the Van Dorn Detective Agency, one of the great rival investigators to the Pinkertons in early American history. He is tall, blond, fast with a gun, and faster with an observation. He drives early automobiles, boards steamships, rides trains across a continent that’s still being stitched together, and encounters the criminals, industrialists, anarchists, and schemers of an America in the process of becoming something new.
Each book places Bell in a specific year — roughly the 1900s through the 1930s — and against a specific historical backdrop:
- The Chase (1906): A bank-robbing murderer working his way across the Gold Rush West
- The Spy (1908): Saboteurs targeting the Navy’s first all-big-gun battleship
- The Race (1910): Sabotage during a coast-to-coast air race
- The Bootlegger (1920): Prohibition rum runners on the Great Lakes
- The Cutthroat (1914): A Jack the Ripper-style killer loose in New York
- The Titanic Secret (1911): The disaster that gave the series its most famous historical anchor
The period setting isn’t backdrop — it’s the engine. Cussler and his collaborators built each book around a specific slice of American history, and the procedural challenge is always shaped by what investigators could and couldn’t do before fingerprinting was standardised, before widespread telephone communication, before most of the infrastructure of modern detection existed.
Bell solves cases in a world where you have to physically go to where the evidence is.
The Authors: Three Eras
The Isaac Bell Adventures Series has a more complex authorship history than most Cussler series, and understanding it helps explain both the consistency of the books and how the series survived its founder.
Era One: Cussler Alone — The Chase (2007)
Clive Cussler wrote The Chase solo — the only Bell novel he wrote without a credited collaborator. It establishes Bell, the Van Dorn Agency, the tone, and the period. As an opening novel it functions as a complete story while laying down everything the series would later build on. Cussler had been writing adventure fiction for three decades by this point, and it shows: The Chase arrives fully formed.
Era Two: Cussler & Justin Scott (2009–2017)
Books 2 through 10 are co-written with Justin Scott — a novelist in his own right, with a background in maritime fiction and period thrillers that made him a natural fit for Bell’s world. Scott handled the primary prose drafting based on Cussler’s story concepts and outlines, and the collaboration produced the series’ most sustained run: nine books across eight years that established the template — specific historical year, specific historical threat, Bell working the case with the same combination of physicality and intelligence.
This era covers Bell’s cases from 1908 to 1914 (The Spy through The Cutthroat) and the 1920 Prohibition thriller The Bootlegger. It includes the best-regarded entries in the series by many readers: The Race, The Spy, and The Cutthroat in particular.
Era Three: The Transition and Jack Du Brul (2019–present)
By 2019, Jack Du Brul — already the driving force behind the Oregon Files Series — began taking over the Bell series. The Titanic Secret (2019) and The Saboteurs (2021) are credited to both Cussler and Du Brul, representing a deliberate handover of the character.
Clive Cussler died on February 24, 2020, at the age of 88. He left behind one of the most productive legacies in American adventure fiction: five concurrent series with dedicated readerships, all of which have continued under collaborators he worked with directly during his lifetime. The Isaac Bell transition was already underway before his death.
The Sea Wolves (2022) and The Heist (2024) are credited to Du Brul alone. The period setting, the Van Dorn Agency, and the Bell characterisation remain consistent with the earlier books. Du Brul understands what makes the series work and has not tried to modernise it.
What Makes It Different from Cussler’s Other Series
Cussler’s other major series — Dirk Pitt, NUMA Files, Oregon Files — are contemporary thrillers. High technology, global reach, often science-fiction-adjacent in their MacGuffins.
The Bell books operate on a different register entirely. The historical setting creates constraints that sharpen the stories: Bell can’t run a global database search or track a suspect by phone. He has to work the case the way cases were actually worked in 1910 — through witnesses, physical evidence, informants, and the willingness to go wherever the trail goes.
The result is something closer to a classic detective novel than the Pitt series, but with Cussler’s signature pacing and the sense that the world itself is an adventure playground. The early automobiles are thrilling because cars are new. The first aeroplanes are miraculous because flight is new. The America Bell moves through is recognisable but genuinely foreign.
The Wider Cussler Universe
The Bell series sits alongside but mostly separate from Cussler’s contemporary series. Occasionally a character name or organisation echoes across the catalogue, but the Bell books don’t require knowledge of Dirk Pitt or the Oregon Files.
If you’ve read other Cussler series and are coming to Bell, expect a different pace — more methodical, more historically grounded, less globe-trotting. If Bell is your entry point into Cussler, the Dirk Pitt Series is the natural next destination once you want contemporary adventure at scale.
Where to Start
Start with The Chase — the 2007 solo Cussler novel that opens the series. It’s the only book where you’re hearing Bell entirely through Cussler’s voice without a collaborator, and as a first novel it does everything a series opener should: introduces the character, establishes the world, and delivers a complete and satisfying case.
The books read well in order and benefit from it. Bell’s relationships at the Van Dorn Agency and in his personal life develop across the run in ways that don’t demand sequential reading but reward it.
See the full Isaac Bell Adventures Series reading order →
The Full Series at a Glance
| # | Title | Year | Author(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Chase | 2007 | Clive Cussler |
| 2 | The Wrecker | 2009 | Cussler & Justin Scott |
| 3 | The Spy | 2010 | Cussler & Justin Scott |
| 4 | The Race | 2011 | Cussler & Justin Scott |
| 5 | The Thief | 2012 | Cussler & Justin Scott |
| 6 | The Striker | 2013 | Cussler & Justin Scott |
| 7 | The Bootlegger | 2014 | Cussler & Justin Scott |
| 8 | The Assassin | 2015 | Cussler & Justin Scott |
| 9 | The Gangster | 2016 | Cussler & Justin Scott |
| 10 | The Cutthroat | 2017 | Cussler & Justin Scott |
| 11 | The Titanic Secret | 2019 | Cussler & Jack Du Brul |
| 12 | The Saboteurs | 2021 | Cussler & Jack Du Brul |
| 13 | The Sea Wolves | 2022 | Jack Du Brul |
| 14 | The Heist | 2024 | Jack Du Brul |
For the complete author page — including Cussler’s Dirk Pitt, NUMA Files, Oregon Files, and Fargo Adventures — see the Clive Cussler series list. For Jack Du Brul’s other work, see his author page.