Harlan Coben was born on 4 January 1962 in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Livingston, where he went to the local high school. The New Jersey Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 2017, records the route from there: Amherst College, and a degree in political science.

At Amherst he was in the same fraternity as Dan Brown, and he read The Da Vinci Code in manuscript. He went into his family’s travel business after graduating and wrote in the evenings. He still lives in New Jersey, in Ridgewood, with his wife, the paediatrician Anne Armstrong-Coben, and their four children.

His first novel, Play Dead, appeared in 1990 and sold modestly, as did Miracle Cure the following year. Neither made him a living, and he kept working in the travel business while he wrote.

The breakthrough in form came in 1995 with Deal Breaker, which introduced Myron Bolitar, a sports agent who solves crimes. It ran to eleven books with four further spin-off novels, and it won him the Edgar, the Shamus and the Anthony — the three awards American crime writing takes most seriously, and a set nobody had completed before.

The money changed with the standalone thrillers. Tell No One, published in 2001, sold in numbers the Bolitar books had not and was filmed in France in 2006. From then on he produced roughly a book a year, most of them number-one bestsellers in Britain and top-ten in the United States, and the foreign-language editions became as valuable as the English ones.

The New Jersey Hall of Fame put him at more than 75 million books in print worldwide in 43 languages, across 36 works of fiction. Eight years and eight more novels later, and with a screen adaptation driving readers back to the backlist each time, our working takes the figure to roughly 100 million copies.

That is where his craft earnings come from. At a blended author’s net of $0.70 to $1.20 a copy — higher on hardbacks and e-books, much lower on mass-market paperbacks and on the share of foreign licence fees that reaches the author — 100 million copies give gross royalties of $70 million to $120 million over thirty-six years. His advances, including the five-book contract with Grand Central Publishing that The Associated Press reported in March 2018 when he left Dutton, are drawn against those royalties rather than added to them.

In August 2018 Netflix announced a multi-year exclusive overall deal covering fourteen existing titles plus future projects, in English and in other languages. It was an unusual arrangement for a novelist: not a single option but a standing commitment to adapt his catalogue, with him attached to the productions.

Deadline reported in October 2022 that Netflix had re-upped the arrangement for a further four years and twelve more titles, including the whole Bolitar series. The adaptations have been made in Britain, Spain, France and Poland as well as in English, and Fool Me Once was the platform’s most-watched series of the first half of 2024: TheWrap reported 107.5 million views and 689.5 million hours. Those are Netflix’s audience numbers, not his pay.

He is one of a very small group of novelists whose name sells a television series on its own, and Netflix has marketed the adaptations under it. In Britain, where his readership is proportionally largest, he has had a run of number-one bestsellers stretching across two decades.

Beyond the awards, the recognition is commercial: his publishers treat each January as a Coben slot, and the streaming adaptations have twice pushed decade-old novels back into the bestseller charts.

He does not carry brand endorsements in the way a sportsman or an actor does. What he has instead is paid appearance work: literary festivals, publisher tours, corporate speaking and a steady run of broadcast interviews tied to each book and each series.

Speaking fees for an author of his standing run from $20,000 to $50,000 an engagement. Our working puts the whole non-writing appearance income at $2 million to $5 million across the career, which is immaterial next to the royalties and deliberately treated as such.

His business is the rights to his own work, and it is structured accordingly. He retains ownership of the novels, licenses them rather than selling them outright, and takes executive-producer credits on the adaptations, several of which he has also co-written. That keeps the screen money on his side of the table instead of a one-off option fee.

His interests sit entirely in publishing and television. The travel business he worked in early on belonged to his family, and what carries his name now is the books and the screen rights, which makes his balance sheet unusually simple for someone at this level of income.

The family home is in Ridgewood, in Bergen County, one of the more expensive commuter towns in northern New Jersey, where large older houses trade between $1.5 million and $4 million. He has also kept a house on the New Jersey shore, the setting for a good deal of his fiction.

Our estimate puts the property at $4 million to $8 million in total, on local comparable prices. There is no reported collection, aircraft or boat, and his outgoings have stayed out of the press.