He is the main character of the novels The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn, and of the short story "Mirror Image."

He meets up with R. Daneel again in The Naked Sun, where again he is asked to investigate the murder of a Spacer, this time on the planet Solaria, making him the first Earthman to leave Earth since the first wave of colonization.

While off Earth he develops a somewhat romantic and sexual relation with Gladia, a Spacer woman who, prompted by meeting him, becomes the first Solarian in centuries to willingly leave Solaria and the last to do so.

In "Robots and Empire" he is seen in a number of flashbacks, in particular over the course of the novel, Giskard, Gladia and finally Daneel all recall the last time they ever met him.

However, in The Robots of Dawn, Baley recalls his mother cajoling him to eat her chicken soup and telling him that even the Spacers did not have anything as good.

In the same way, Baley's intense shame at his father's declassification and the resulting deprivations of his childhood are not referred to in succeeding novels.

In the 1969 British television adaptation of The Naked Sun (an episode of the BBC2 series Out of the Unknown), Baley was played by Paul Maxwell.