Editor and blogger Janet Rudolph, for instance, recalls the creator of Sergeant Cribb and police detective Peter Diamond as being “a wonderful, supportive, warm, intelligent, and talented man,” someone she first encountered “in person at the Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay [England] in 1991,” when the author met her train while “maneuvering a ‘trolley’ to gather our bags. All he needed was a hat and a uniform, and we would have been transported back to Victorian England.” Novelist Martin Edwards, a friend of Lovesey’s since the late 1980s, had the honor of interviewing him during CrimeFest in 2017. Much more recently, Edwards writes, he “visited Peter at his home in Shrewsbury,” only to find that he was “extremely frail, but in remarkably good spirits. … He and I both knew it would be our last time together and it was an extremely poignant and emotional occasion for me, as I believe it was for him.”
Meanwhile, a post from Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter tells that “When we created the Barry Awards 28 years ago, Peter won the very first Barry Award for Best Mystery with his Bloodhounds. A few years ago when Peter came to Salt Lake City for a signing I met him at the airport and we spent the day together—a cherished memory for me. At the Dallas Bouchercon [in 2019] where he was honored, I got the opportunity to interview him. I always described him as a class act in all respects. He has left a great literary legacy that should not be forgotten. We all can’t live forever, but if you are a writer of Peter’s caliber, your works certainly can—and should.”
I was never so much as in the same room with Lovesey, but I did interview him on two separate occasions—the first time by international mail back in 1981. I revisited that long-ago exchange in the introduction to my second published discussion with him, in 2014. I explained that my determination to quiz Lovesey had “revolved around Cribb, a British television series then beginning its second-season run on U.S. public broadcast stations (under the title Sergeant Cribb). Lovesey, with his wife, Jackie (aka Jax), was writing all of the episodes, eight of which were based on his Cribb novels. A pilot, adapted from Waxwork (1978), his Silver Dagger Award-winning final Cribb tale, was shown in the UK just before Christmas, 1979, with the series following the next spring.” (Watch the pilot here.)
I have no memory of how I contacted the author; there was no Facebook in the early ’80s, and no Web sites through which writers might quickly be reached. Presumably, I typed a letter to his publisher and waited ... and waited for a reply. In any event, I was finally trusted with Lovesey’s mailing address and, as I related in The Rap Sheet in 2014, promptly sent him “four typewritten pages containing 42 questions. Lovesey responded a couple of weeks later with five single-spaced pages containing his answers, together with a cover letter that concluded: ‘If you have some more questions, I would appreciate it if they were not too many, as I can’t spare much more time on this. Perhaps I’ve given you enough already? I’m an optimist.’”
That epistolary confab, and the generosity Lovesey showed in answering my myriad queries, provoked me to keep up with his literary output. My fondness for the Victorian-era Cribb mysteries—which The Telegraph says “paved the way for other period detectives” and “showed that it was possible to combine a well-plotted mystery with a pungent evocation of the past”—led me on to his standalones, such as The False Inspector Dew (1982) and The Reaper (2000). I gobbled up Bertie and the Tinman (1987) as well as his subsequent pair of sleuthing stories starring Queen Victoria’s likeable if libidinous oldest son, Albert Edward, the future King Edward VIII. And of course, I devoured his 22 novels about irascible Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath, England, police department (the last of which, Against the Grain, was released in the States last December).
Only now do I wish I’d been rather less assiduous in keeping up with Lovesey’s production, so there would be more of his books on my shelves still to read. Yet there are plenty worth re-reading.
The author’s U.S. publisher, Soho Crime, released a statement yesterday about his death, which I think is worth posting here, especially for readers new to his fiction:
It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of our dear friend and MWA Grand Master Peter Lovesey. Peter passed away peacefully at his home in Shrewsbury, England, on April 10, 2025, after a courageous battle against pancreatic cancer. He was with Jax, his wife of 65 years. He was 88 years old.Peter Lovesey was a kind man, an unselfish man, and a truly spirited author. George Easter is right: His fiction—both historical and contemporary—should never cease to be enjoyed.
Peter Lovesey was born in 1936 in Middlesex, England, and counted as his earliest memory the 1944 Blitz bombing that destroyed his family’s house. In 1955, he entered Reading University, pursuing a degree in visual arts, but in December of his first year was persuaded to switch departments by an English professor who had been impressed by one of Peter’s essays. He graduated with honors in 1958 and the next year married his sweetheart, Jackie “Jax,” with whom he would have two children, Kathy and Phil. After a decade spent as a teacher, Peter got his start as crime fiction writer via a first novel contest sponsored by Macmillan/Panther.
In a writing career that spanned six decades, Peter published forty-three novels: five stand-alone crime novels, including the CWA Gold Dagger winner The False Inspector Dew, which was selected to be on the CWA’s list of the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time as well as The Times’ Top 100 Crime Novels of the 20th Century; eight Victorian crime novels featuring Sergeant Cribb, which were developed for television starting in 1979; three featuring Bertie, Prince of Wales; two novels in the Hen Mallin series; three novels under the pen name Peter Lear, including the sports novel Goldengirl, adopted into a 1980 film; and twenty-two novels in his flagship Peter Diamond procedural series, starting with his Anthony Award–winning classic The Last Detective and concluding with his poignant final novel, Against the Grain, published in 2024, which he wrote after his diagnosis. He was a prolific short-story writer, and published seven collections during his lifetime. He was also the author of four works of sports non-fiction; it was his expertise in the history of track and field that gave birth to his prizewinning debut, Wobble to Death, a murder mystery set over the course of a Victorian speed-walking race.
Peter Lovesey was the recipient of numerous honors and awards. He was one of the very few writers to have been awarded both the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Special Edgar and the Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement; the short list of other such double honorees includes Sue Grafton, John le Carré, Walter Mosley, and Sara Paretsky. In addition to his Gold Dagger for The False Inspector Dew, he thrice received the Silver Dagger (for Waxwork, The Summons, and Bloodhounds); multiple Macavity (Bloodhounds, The House Sitter), Barry (Bloodhounds), and Anthony Awards (The Last Detective); and nominations for the Edgar Award for Best Novel (The Summons) and Los Angeles Times Book Prize (The House Sitter). He received the 2014 Strand Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2010 Grand Master Award from the Swedish Academy of Detection, and the 2008 Malice Domestic Lifetime Achievement Award. His short stories garnered many prizes, including the CWA Short Story Award and Veuve Clicquot Award, the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and the MWA Golden Mystery Prize. In French translation, his novels received the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and the Prix du Roman d’Aventures.
In addition to the scope of his unparalleled crime fiction career, Peter Lovesey will be remembered by his many grieving friends as the paragon of decency, compassion, loyalty, self-discipline, and pride in good work—in short, a human example of what it means to live a good life. We at Soho Press have been privileged and honored to be Peter’s American publisher for over thirty years, beginning with his now-classic The Last Detective. Fifty years after the publication of his own prize-winning debut, Wobble to Death, Peter collaborated with Soho Crime to sponsor his own first novel contest, launching the career of Edgar-winner Eli Cranor with the publication of Don’t Know Tough. A lifelong member of the Detection Club, Peter was respected as a scholar and advocate of the genre as well as a ment[or] and supporter of new writers.
His absence will be deeply felt but the legacy of his remarkable life and work will live on.
READ MORE: “End of an Era: Peter Lovesey (1936–2025),” by Curtis J. Evans (The Passing Tramp); “Peter Lovesey, 1936–2025,” by Elizabeth Foxwell (The Bunburyist).
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