Below is the complete list of Joe Ide books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of IQ Books
Publication Order of Philip Marlowe Books
About Joe Ide
Joe Ide is an American crime novelist whose IQ series reworks the intellectual appeal of Sherlock Holmes within the neighborhoods of contemporary Los Angeles. A Japanese American who grew up in South Central Los Angeles, Ide drew upon both the environment of his childhood and his early fascination with Arthur Conan Doyle when creating Isaiah Quintabe, an exceptionally intelligent young investigator better known as IQ. The result is a form of Los Angeles noir that combines deduction and street crime with sharp humor, social observation, friendship, and a distinctly modern, multicultural picture of the city.
Ide grew up in the East Adams area surrounded by several generations of his Japanese family in a predominantly African American neighborhood. Being an outsider contributed to his habit of observing people closely, while Sherlock Holmes offered him a fictional hero who could overcome danger through intelligence rather than physical power. Those influences would eventually converge in his fiction, although becoming a novelist was not his first professional path.
Before publishing a novel, Ide spent years working as a screenwriter. He sold scripts, handled assignments and rewrites, and worked for major Hollywood studios, but became frustrated when projects repeatedly failed to reach production. Screenwriting nevertheless taught him economy, visual storytelling, and the importance of constructing scenes efficiently. He eventually turned toward prose fiction and created a character rooted much more directly in the Los Angeles he remembered.
IQ, published in 2016, introduced Isaiah Quintabe, a brilliant but unconventional investigator in East Long Beach. IQ lacks a conventional private-detective office and often helps people whose problems receive little attention from official institutions. His powers of observation and deduction deliberately recall Holmes, but his circumstances, relationships, language, and community make him very much his own character. The debut received the Anthony, Macavity, and Shamus awards and was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.
Ide continued Isaiah’s story through Righteous, Wrecked, Hi Five, Smoke, and Fixit. Rather than resetting IQ after each investigation, the books develop his relationships and personal history alongside increasingly dangerous cases. His friendship with Juanell Dodson becomes particularly important: Dodson is talkative, entrepreneurial, streetwise, and often a comic counterweight to Isaiah’s intense analytical personality. The unresolved circumstances surrounding the death of Isaiah’s older brother Marcus also provide an emotional thread through the earlier novels. As of 2026, Fixit, published in 2023, remains the sixth and most recent IQ novel.
Ide entered another branch of Los Angeles detective history with The Goodbye Coast in 2022. Authorized by Raymond Chandler’s estate, the novel reinvents Philip Marlowe in twenty-first-century Los Angeles rather than attempting to reproduce Chandler’s original period. The project was especially fitting for a writer whose own detective fiction had already demonstrated how older traditions of deduction and noir could be reshaped around a contemporary city.
Across Ide’s bibliography, Los Angeles is never merely scenery. Neighborhood, race, class, popular culture, policing, money, and local speech determine how characters understand one another and which crimes receive attention. His distinctive contribution to modern crime fiction lies in combining the cerebral pleasures of the classic detective story with a Los Angeles populated by people and communities historically pushed toward the margins of traditional noir.