Thursday Trifles

• The 100th anniversary of Elmore Leonard’s birth will be October 11 of this year. Despite the fact that the author died in 2013 at age 87, this coming centenary provides an ideal excuse to reissue some of his best-remembered works. As Barry Forshaw notes in Crime Time, publisher Penguin will bring out new editions of Swag, The Switch, and Rum Punch in June, with more works to follow in its Penguin Modern Classics Crime series. (Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

• Dashiell Hammett’s time spent as a soldier in Alaska is not a subject with which most readers are familiar. Which is undoubtedly why historian David Reamer looked into that story for the latest entry in his weekly series for the Anchorage Daily News.

• In CrimeReads, author Danielle Teller (Forged) makes the case that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby was a con artist. “He seeks cheat codes for acquiring wealth,” she explains, “and takes on a false persona at a young age ..., and he displays many of the narcissistic and psychopathic features associated with con artists, including glib charm, grandiosity, need for admiration, impulsivity, egotism, manipulation, and of course, a willingness to lie.”

• Fictionist and genre historian Martin Edwards has published what he says is his “first ever obituary written for a national newspaper”: a choice remembrance of Peter Lovesey for The Guardian.

• In a new pair of posts, Paul Vidich (The Poet’s Game) first celebrates the career of now 95-year-old spy novelist Len Deighton, and then selects “six novels to highlight Deighton’s considerable talent.”

• Another Miami Vice movie? I hope this one, to be directed by Joseph Kosinski (Spiderhead, F1), will be better than Michael Mann’s underdeveloped 2006 filmed based on his 1980s TV series Miami Vice.

• Reporter and animal rights activist Cleveland Amory spent 13 years (1963-1976) as a television critic for TV Guide magazine. I remember reading and often enjoying his columns (which I have occasionally drawn quotes from for The Rap Sheet). But Amory, himself, did not always enjoy the subjects of said critiques. A case in point: his “scorchingly bad [1965] review of the cult-classic television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” which Ben Bolden posted recently in his blog.

• This coming Sunday, May 11, Americans will be celebrating Mother’s Day. Time again for Janet Rudolph to update her list of crime and mystery novels linked to that annual holiday. Kathi Daley’s The Mother's Day Mishap, Jane Haddam’s Murder Superior, and Selma Eichler’s Murder Can Upset Your Mother are among the many titles (novels and short-story collections) mentioned. More here.

• Finally, here are two interviews worth your attention: Sarah Weinman talks with Kate Summerscale, author of the new-in-the-States true-crime history The Peepshow, which revisits the bizarre case of London serial killer Reg Christie; and Jeri Westerson chats up audiobook narrator Noah James Butler, whom she calls the “Man of a Thousand Voices.”

A Decent Man and One Hell of a Writer

Everybody with some personal connection to renowned British mystery writer Peter Lovesey, who passed away yesterday at age 88, remembers him in their own way.

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 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.

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.

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); “The Loss of Peter Lovesey, a Great Writer,” by Douglas Greene (Crippen & Landru).

Last Acts

As part of this week’s crime-fiction news round-up for In Reference to Murder, blogger B.V. Lawson submits the following item:

In Sarah Weinman’s latest crime fiction column for The New York Times, she made note of two legendary fictional detectives taking their final cases, with Jacqueline Winspear retiring Maisie Dobbs, and Susan Elia MacNeal bidding farewell to Maggie Hope. The Comfort of Ghosts is the 18th outing for Dobbs, the “plucky and resourceful British investigator and psychologist” whom Jacqueline Winspear introduced in 2003, and The Last Hope is the 11th installment for Maggie Hope, once Winston Churchill’s secretary and now “a capable and shrewd spy.” Winspear also paid tribute to her literary creation in her newsletter on her website.

At least one other long-running sleuth is also signing off before the end of 2024: Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath, England, police department. First introduced in Peter Lovesey’s Anthony Award-winning 1991 novel, The Last Detective, Diamond has since starred in 21 sequels. Those include Against the Grain, which is due out in Britain in November (from Sphere) and in the States come December (from Soho Crime). Clearly described on its U.S. jacket as “The Conclusion of the Peter Diamond Series,” it finds the old-school cop away from his desk but enjoying little rest. Here’s Amazon’s plot synopsis:

Detective Peter Diamond, chief of the Avon and Somerset Murder Squad, is taking a short holiday in the country. His former colleague Julie Hargreaves has invited Diamond and his partner, Paloma, to visit the idyllic village of Baskerville (no relation to the Sherlock Holmes story, so he’s told). It turns out Julie’s invitation was not without ulterior motives. The woman who owns the village’s largest dairy farm has been convicted of manslaughter following a terrible accident in her grain silo. Julie’s ex-investigator instinct tells her there has been a miscarriage of justice and a murderer is on the loose—but Julie's been keeping secrets of her own, and can’t take her inquiry any further.

Diamond takes the bait; the case is a fascinating one, and he’s quite enjoying his incognito information-gathering, getting to know the villagers as they prepare for their annual Harvest Festival. The deeper into the cow dung Diamond mucks, the more convinced he becomes there was foul play. But maintaining his innocent tourist façade becomes harder as he closes in on his suspects. To protect his alias, he might have to learn how to operate a tractor or drive a herd of wayward cows. He might even be forced to attend a hoedown—not that he’d dance, not even to catch a killer. Or would he? The curmudgeonly detective has plenty to learn about himself as he tries on some new hats: undercover private investigator; village detective; country gentleman.

I’ve read all of Lovesey’s Peter Diamond mysteries to date, and am unlikely to miss this one. How about you?

PaperBack: “The Detective Wore Silk Drawers”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



The Detective Wore Silk Drawers, by Peter Lovesey (Penguin, 1980). Published originally in 1971, this was Lovesey’s second novel starring Victorian detective Sergeant Archibald Cribb, following 1970’s Wobble to Death. Cover design and illustration by Neil Stuart, who was at one time art director for Penguin USA.

Bullet Points: Changes and Chan Edition

• The Rocky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America will soon begin accepting entries to its 7th annual Six-Word Mystery Contest. The idea is to sum up an entire story in the space of just half a dozen words. Last year, for instance, Colorado resident Rita A. Popp won the overall competition with this witty effort: “Magician escapes gallows when witness vanishes.” This year’s contest opens on September 1, with submissions to be accepted until midnight MST on October 7. Entry details will be posted here. As a press release explains, “Six-word ‘whodunits’ can be entered in one or all five of the following categories: Hard-boiled or Noir; Cozy Mystery; Thriller Mystery; Police Procedural Mystery; and/or a mystery involving Romance or Lust. The Six-Word Mystery Contest is open to all adults 18 and over. No residency requirements. The contest entry fee is $6 for one entry or $10 to enter six-word mysteries in all five categories. The grand prize winner will receive $100 in cold, hard cash. Winners in all other categories will receive $25, and all winners and finalists will be featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, on our RMMWA website, and in our popular monthly newsletter, Deadlines. Participants will be invited to the chapter’s annual Mystery & Mistletoe Holiday Party in December, which will be held live and on Zoom.”



• Like so many other people, I suspect, I started watching Season 2 of The Lincoln Lawyer—based on Michael Connelly’s 2011 novel, The Fifth Witness, and starring Manuel Garcia Rulfo as Los Angeles attorney Mickey Haller—with the assumption that it would run only five episodes in length, as opposed to last year’s 10; after all, that’s how many installments dropped at once onto its Netflix page on July 6. Also like so many others, I was surprised to discover that those comprised only half the story. “I thought it was a good idea,” co-showrunner/co-creator Ted Humphrey told Deadline recently. Well, I for one object. The second five episodes aren’t slated to drop until Thursday, August 3. By then, I’ll surely have forgotten some of the plot nuances from the initial set, and will have to review. Sigh … At least this season’s second-part trailer (above) makes me want to see more.

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

As filming gets underway on the ninth season of the hit Masterpiece and ITV show, Grantchester, lead actor Tom Brittney has confirmed that Season 9 will be his last. Tom, who has played the much-loved character Reverend Will Davenport since 2019, is stepping back from his role to focus on new projects. But it was announced that Rishi Nair (Hollyoaks, Count Abdulla) will take over as charismatic vicar, Alphy Kotteram. Nair will be the third vicar character in the series, following Brittney and the original, James Norton, who was featured from 2014-2019. Robson Green, who has played the various vicars’ police counterpart, Detective Inspector Geordie Keating, will return once again. The series is based on The Grantchester Mysteries, collections of short stories written by James Runcie.

• Nathan Ward, who penned the 2015 Dashiell Hammett biography The Lost Detective, recently had a captivating piece posted in CrimeReads, recalling the circumstances of a 1902 shipboard murder. At the end of that article, it mentions that Ward has a new book coming out in September: Son of the Old West (Atlantic Monthly Press), about Old West lawman, bounty hunter, and Pinkerton detective Charlie Siringo. That’s definitely being added to my must-read list.

• Although I never got around to watching the 2014-2016 BBC One TV crime drama The Missing, I did enjoy its 2019-2021 spin-off, Baptiste, starring Turkish-born French performer Tchéky Karyo as police detective Julien Baptiste, a role he had created for the previous series. So I was intrigued to learn that UK author David Hewson—who previously adapted the Danish TV drama The Killing as a trilogy of books—has produced a prequel novel to Baptiste. Titled Baptiste: The Blade Must Fall, it is due out from UK publisher Orion in November of this year. A press release offers the following plot synopsis:

Julien Baptiste is an intelligent but somewhat naïve detective, sent to work in Clermiers, a town filled with corruption. A girl goes missing, presumed dead after bloody clothes are found close to an illicit party near an abandoned chateau. Baptiste believes he’s nailed the culprit, the eccentric Gilles Lellouche. When he appears in court, the public call for the guillotine—and that’s the sentence Lellouche gets. But as Lellouche awaits an appeal for clemency, he asks to see Baptiste, who’s still haunted by the fact the girl’s body remains missing. As the clock ticks towards execution hour, Baptiste begins to realise he may have made a terrible mistake …

• A rather belated congratulations to Elizabeth Foxwell, the managing editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection, who has replaced the eminent, now retired Jon L. Breen as a “Jury Box” columnist for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. As she explains, “I am the first woman to write the column--I think I’ll be writing one column per year.” Foxwell’s initial submission features in EQMM’s July/August issue.

• Here’s another book treat for you: Lou Armagno, who masterminds the Charlie Chan-focused blog The Postman on Holiday, will soon release a new non-fiction work about that renowned Hawaiian detective. The Wisdom Within Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan: The Original Aphorisms Inside the Charlie Chan Canon (BookBaby) is set to premiere as an e-book on August 26 (the 139th birthday of Chan creator Biggers), with the print edition due out September 4. “Through the years,” remarks Armagno in his blog, “I’ve read many books on the aphorisms of Charlie Chan. However, all concentrated on the sayings found in films—never those inside the novels. And Ohio author Earl Derr Biggers worked hard to entwine the words of great philosophers into his stories for meaning and enlightenment. So this book is just ‘to set the record straight’ …” Armagno very kindly asked yours truly for a back-cover blurb, along with editor/bookseller Otto Penzler and attorney/writer Leslie S. Klinger. I look forward to procuring a finished copy of this delightful collection.

• Martin Edwards reports in his blog on a delightful visit he made to the “150-year-old coach house” home of novelist Peter Lovesey, in historic Shrewsbury, England. “‘Never meet your heroes’ is one of those ‘rules’ in life that has some merit,” is how Edwards introduces his post, “but there are also various exceptions to it. Perhaps it depends on the hero!”

• It appears that Terry Hayes, the English-born Australian screenwriter and author whose first suspense novel, I Am Pilgrim, came out in 2014 to a widespread chorus of acclaim, finally has a second (and, it should be mentioned, much delayed) book teed up and ready to go. The Real Book Spy says The Year of the Locust, “sure to be one of the biggest releases next year,” is set for release next February from Atria/Emily Bestler Books.

• I missed drawing attention to the nominees for this year’s Scribe Awards, organized by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers and intended to honor “licensed works that tie in with other media such as television, movies, gaming, or comic books.” Blogger B.V. Lawson observes that “There are some honorees of interest to the crime fiction community, including in the General/Adapted Novel category: Murder She Wrote: Death on the Emerald Isle by Terrie Moran, and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Firewall by James Swallow (which was also nominated in the Audiobook category).” Winners are to be declared on July 21 during San Diego Comic-Con.

• Mark your calendars: Murder One, Ireland’s International Crime Writing Festival, will return to a venue outside Dublin during the weekend of October 6-8. Among the authors taking part will be Tana French, Jane Casey, Steve Cavanagh, Sophie Hannah, and Alice Feeney, This press bulletin lays out more details.

• And I was saddened to read that American singer Tony Bennett, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, died yesterday at age 96. Although for a long time I ignored his work, as I grew more mature, I came to appreciate it greatly. I own a number of his CDs, and was hoping to one day see him perform live. (The closest I ever got was in 2006, when Bennett was invited to attend the 100th anniversary commemoration of San Francisco’s great earthquake and fire. Unfortunately, he couldn’t make it.) While I knew that he’d guested as himself in a variety of TV presentations (including one I remember distinctly: a 1997 episode of the Brooke Shields sitcom Suddenly Susan), I wasn’t aware that his screen credits also included parts on both 77 Sunset Strip and Remington Steele. Live and learn.

Around the Dial

• Mystery Fanfare reports that Beyond Paradise, a spin-off series from the long-running comedy-mystery Death in Paradise, is set to debut simultaneously on BritBox (in the United States) and BBC One (in the UK) on Friday, February 24. It will find actor Kris Marshall returning as Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman, a role he occupied in the original series for more than three seasons. You’ll recall that Goodman left the police department on the Caribbean island of Saint Marie partway through Season 6 to head back to England with his new girlfriend, Martha Lloyd (Sally Bretton). Beyond Paradise finds them “arriving in Shipton Abbott, Martha’s hometown near the beautiful Devonshire coast ... As they embark on their new life whilst temporarily living with Martha’s mum, Anne Lloyd [Barbara Flynn​], the couple is quickly thrown in at the deep end as Martha sets out to pursue her dream of running her own restaurant, and Humphrey joins the local police force. Each week the team will face a new crime with a unique puzzle at its heart. As Humphrey gets stuck into his new job, he and Martha must also navigate life’s ups and downs, as faces from the past, the decisions they make, and the challenges of setting up life in a new town put their relationship to the ultimate test.” Also among this show’s cast will be Dylan Llewellyn (Derry Girls) playing Police Constable Kelby Hartford, and Zahra Ahmadi (Innocent) as Detective Sergeant Esther Williams. UPDATE: The Killing Times says that Season 1 of Beyond Paradise will run just six episodes long.

• Well, I didn’t see this coming: CBS Studios has ordered up a gender-swap reboot of the popular 1986–1995 legal drama Matlock, replacing the late Andy Griffith with Kathy Bates as series lead. “The Matlock reboot,” explains In Reference to Murder, “is centered on Madeline Matlock, a brilliant septuagenarian who rejoins the work force at a prestigious law firm, where she uses her unassuming demeanor and wily tactics to win cases and expose corruption from within.” Actress Bates previously played an attorney on the 2011–2012 series Harry’s Law. If this version of Matlock does, indeed, wind up on the CBS schedule, that will be its third television network home. It started out on NBC, but moved over to ABC in 1992.

• Amazon Studios is developing two new small-screen series based on Michael Connelly’s police procedurals. The first would return Jamie Hector to his Bosch role as Detective Jerry Edgar, but send him from Los Angeles to Little Haiti, Miami, on an undercover FBI mission. “In this glamorous city,” says Deadline, “he is forced to balance his new life with the gritty underbelly of the city, while being chased by his mysterious past.” In the meantime, L.A. police detective Renée Ballard, who was first introduced in Connelly’s 2017 novel, The Late Show, is set to star in a different as-yet-unnamed drama that finds her “tasked with running the LAPD’s new cold case division. Beyond simply investigating unsolved crimes, Renée is dedicated to bringing credibility to the department and justice to the community. Having learned from retired ally and mentor Harry Bosch, Renee does things her way—solving cases in unconventional ways while navigating the politics of being a woman on the rise in the LAPD.” There’s no word yet on when or where these new programs might debut.

• Happy Valley, the award-winning BBC One TV series starring Sarah Lancashire, just ended its third-season run in Great Britain. It’s not expected to reach U.S. screens until this coming May. If you can’t wait to learn more, check out the following reviews of individual Season 3 episodes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

• The blog Crime Fiction Lover is already hoping for the launch of a novel series to continue the character stories from Happy Valley.

• Hallmark Movies & Mysteries has begun filming a brand-new whodunit series titled The Cases of Mystery Lane. It will star Aimee Garcia and Paul Campbell as Birdie and Alden Case, “a married couple who find a new way to keep to keep the mystery alive … quite literally.” Hallmark Media’s director of development, Laura Gaines, is quoted as saying this show will combine “romance, humor, and intrigue, reminiscent of some of my favorite stories of amateur sleuths, in over their heads,” such as McMillan & Wife and the later Hart to Hart. Again, there’s no news regarding a premiere date.​

• And as part of the promotions campaign for his latest Peter Diamond detective novel, Showstopper—which concerns the supposed jinxing of a TV crime drama—author Peter Lovesey recounts here a jumbo-sized case of bad luck that struck Cribb, the 1980-1981 program based on his early Sergeant Cribb mysteries.

Lovesey Endorses a Debut Novel

Don’t Know Tough, by Arkansas high school football coach and newspaper columnist Eli Cranor, has won this year’s first-ever Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest. That announcement was included yesterday in a delightful video celebration of Lovesey’s Golden Anniversary as a mystery writer, hosted by McKenna Jordan of Houston, Texas’ Murder by the Book, with guest appearances by Jeffery Deaver, Liza Cody, Lawrence Block, Peter Robinson, and others.

According to a news release, Don't Know Tough is “about a high school football player with an explosively troubled home life, the idealistic coach who thinks he can save him, and the murder that threatens to tear their Arkansas town apart on the eve of the playoffs.” Cranor’s winning manuscript was chosen from among 200 contest entries. It will be published by Soho Crime in the spring of 2022.

You can watch the hour-long Lovesey “virtual gala” here.

Lovesey’s Long Run for Renown

If you have paid a visit to the Kirkus Reviews Web site this morning, you’ve probably already spotted my new interview there with distinguished British mystery writer Peter Lovesey. I took the opportunity recently to quiz him--via e-mail--about The Stone Wife (Soho Crime), his 14th outing for Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath, England, police department. As I explain in the article, that novel finds the irritable but determined Diamond trying to

get to the bottom of an auction-house holdup, during which the top bidder for a massive slab of carved stone was killed. The deceased: John Gildersleeve, a professor of Medieval English and an authority on Geoffrey Chaucer, who believed the coveted artifact--known as the Wife of Bath--was linked to his favorite English poet. Was Gildersleeve’s shooting incidental to the theft, or was the robbery a smokescreen for croaking the educator? Diamond’s probing sends him to Chaucer’s house in Somerset, while his colleague Ingeborg Smith pursues an undercover inquiry into illicit weapons suppliers. A rookie cop gone missing and fears that the Wife has cursed Diamond’s office add to this tale’s complications.

But what often happens with my interviews happened with this one, too: I had more to ask Lovesey about than I had room for his answers in Kirkus. So I’m posting the balance of our exchange below.

This is actually the second time I have carried on a lengthy discussion with Lovesey. He’s very unlikely to remember that, however, because the first occasion was way back in 1981. At the time, I was a staff writer for the “alternative weekly” newspaper Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon. It was my first job out of college, and I was brimming with excitement at the chance not only to cover serious local news, but to contribute to the paper’s entertainment section, Fresh Weekly. I wound up doing a number of author interviews for FW, including with Robert B. Parker, Arthur Lyons, and George C. Chesbro, but Lovesey was the earliest one I conducted through the public mails. With his American publisher’s assistance, I sent a letter to him in early 1981, asking whether he’d be willing to field questions from me concerning his life and career, and he said “yes.”

Lovesey, by then, had seen 10 of his novels published, most of them--starting with 1970’s Wobble to Death--starring Sergeant Cribb, a military man turned London policeman, who’d advanced to Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in part as a result of the local force’s embarrassing “Turf Fraud” corruption scandal of 1877. Cribb wasn’t an intellectual rival of Sherlock Holmes; he couldn’t deduce the height, weight, and intestinal ailments of a suspect simply by sticking his nose into the man’s pipe shag. Instead, he was a tenacious detective capable of meanness and deceit, but in the words of his creator, “a fine exemplar of a popular Victorian adjective: earnest.” Cribb’s polite persistence at pursuing clues scattered about a case usually resulted in a conviction.

My particular interest in Lovesey in 1981 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. English thespian Alan Dobie took the role of Sergeant Cribb, with Welsh actor William Simons playing his less-brilliant but still indispensable partner, Constable Edward Thackeray.

Intending to compose a piece about Cribb and Lovesey for Fresh Weekly, I made an initial contact with the author and then followed-up with four typewritten pages containing 42 questions. (Even back then, it seems, I had enough cheek and curiosity for half a dozen other writers.) Lovesey responded a couple of weeks later with five typewritten pages containing his answers, along 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.” (Amazingly, I saved all of that correspondence, and have now scanned and posted it here for your edification.) Due to reasons I cannot now recall, the entertainment editor of Willamette Week ultimately could not use my finished article, so I peddled it instead to the TV section of Portland’s largest daily paper, The Oregonian.

(Left) Peter Lovesey in 1981. (Photograph by Philip Lovesey.)

Over the last three decades, Peter Lovesey has taken his career well beyond the Cribb yarns, as popular as they were--and continue to be. He’s concocted two other mystery series: one (beginning with 1987’s Bertie and the Tinman) that imagines Queen Victoria’s amiable but randy oldest son, Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales—and future King Edward VII—as a manifestly inexpert sleuth; and the other led by the aforementioned Peter Diamond (who debuted in 1991’s The Last Detective, a work that captured the Anthony Award for Best Novel). In addition, this author has produced half a dozen standalones, among them: The False Inspector Dew--one of my personal favorites from his oeuvre--which won the 1982 Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA); On the Edge (1989), adapted for the small screen in 2002 as Dead Gorgeous (all of which can be watched online, beginning here); 2000’s The Reaper, the one-off novel that Lovesey says “I like best”; and The Circle, which gave Detective Chief Inspector Henrietta “Hen” Mallin (from The House Sitter, 2003) her first starring role. Lovesey served as the chair of the CWA from 1991 to 1992, and in 2000, received the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger lifetime achievement award for his crime-fiction writing.

I never thought that, 33 years after I originally interviewed him, I would again be sending Peter Lovesey a list of questions--45 of them on this occasion, three more than before. But with no complaints, the now 78-year-old novelist answered every one, telling me about his boyhood experiences during World War II, his longstanding interest in track-and-field sports, the origins--and first name--of Sergeant Cribb, the historical class structure of Scotland Yard, Peter Diamond’s struggles as a character, and so much more. As I said, the first part of our exchange was posted earlier today in Kirkus Reviews. The larger portion of our e-mail discussion can be enjoyed below.

J. Kingston Pierce: I know very little about your parents, other than that your father left school early--at age 13, I believe. What did your father do for a living? And was it your parents who instilled in you a love for reading, or did that come later, from another influence?

Peter Lovesey: My father joined a bank after leaving school and was a bank clerk all his working life, apart from the six years of World War II, when he was in the army. My mother leaned shorthand at Pitman’s secretarial college and had mainly secretarial jobs, eventually becoming secretary to the general manager of the Parker Pen company in the UK. After marriage she became a mother and housewife like most of her generation. They encouraged their three children through school and we were all keen readers. The love of books must have been in the genes. My paternal grandfather, Charles Lovesey, was the son of a woodman, but taught himself Latin and Greek and became a grammar-school headmaster. His wife, Minnie, won a prize for poetry. On my mother’s side, great-grandfather was a bookbinder and we still have editions of Dickens he bound.

JKP: You were born in Whitton, which was once a town known for its gardens and orchards, but is now part of southwest London. What was your childhood like?

PL: Good research! When we lived there it was suburban London, built over, with a couple of small parks and a long street of shops beside the station where commuter trains took us in 30 minutes to London Waterloo. But my father, who worked in west London, cycled to the bank until the mid-1950s, when they bought their first car. I did a lot of cycling myself and got to know places nearby, such as Hampton Court [Palace], where King Henry VIII once presided; Kneller Hall, the home of military music; and Twickenham rugby ground, where all the big rugby football internationals were played. Sport was a major part of our lives and Dad followed it keenly (his own father had captained Devon at rugby and played against international teams), and took us to soccer, cricket, and athletics. Unfortunately, I was hopeless at ball games and athletics, but followed sport keenly all my life and it got me started in writing.

JKP: Whitton was damaged by bombs during World War II. Were you still living there during that period? And how did that war shape the young Peter Harmer Lovesey?

PL: I was 3 at the outbreak of war and 9 when it ended. Being kids, we felt none of the stress and enjoyed the excitement. For us, the war was mainly going on overhead and we got to recognize the various planes and their engine sounds. We were taught the routine of going down into shelters during raids. Afterwards no one could stop us scouring the streets for bits of shrapnel from bombs.

In August 1944, my own house was destroyed by a V-1 ”flying bomb” that landed in the back garden. Miraculously, we all survived, although our neighbors in the other half of the suburban semi were killed. I was at school (down a shelter) and my mother had gone shopping, leaving my two brothers, John and Andrew, in the house. When the air-raid warning sounded, they got under the Morrison shelter, a cast-iron table with metal grille sides, and were dug out alive. Of course it was a huge event in our lives that I remember vividly. We were homeless and spent some weeks on a farm in Cornwall. Some of those experiences went into a book I wrote later, called Rough Cider [1986]. We were without books for some time (understandably my parents had other priorities, finding us food and clothes and somewhere to live), and I can recall the excitement some years after when I found two books in a cupboard. One was The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall [1929], about a persuasive defense lawyer involved in many of the great murder trials of the early 20th century. The other was Alias the Saint [1931], by Leslie Charteris. In my ignorance I thought this must be a religious book. I read them both, over and over, and filled my head with crime of the real and fictional sort.

JKP: Did you say you have siblings?

PL: John, seven years my senior, followed our father into the banking profession and ultimately became a director of several banks. Andrew, who was three years younger than me, became a doctor of biochemistry and was registrar of a London hospital. He wrote a sci-fi/fantasy book, The Half-Angels, published in 1975, and would have written more, but he died of diabetes at the age of 40.

JKP: I understand you first became really interested in sports at age 12, when you went to see the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. Was that your parents’ doing? And what do you remember from those Games that excited you in particular?

PL: The Olympics were a big inspiration. Almost as big, however, was being taken by my father in 1945, at the end of the war, to London’s White City stadium, to see the world record-breaking Swedes, [Gunder] Hägg and [Arne] Andersson, take on Sydney Wooderson, Britain’s world record-holder for the 880 yards. The crowds were huge, and we didn’t get in, but we stood outside. Just hearing the crowd fired my imagination. Later the same year, we did get in to a big sports event, when the Moscow Dynamo soccer team played Arsenal, but a ”pea-soup” fog came down and it was difficult to see anything. Thwarted again--yet the excitement at both big events was intoxicating. More than 50 years later, I was thrilled to get to know Wooderson as a friend.

But you asked about the 1948 Olympics. They were at Wembley and Dad managed to get tickets for one day only. The big race was the women’s 80 meters hurdles in which the star of the games, the “Flying Dutchwoman,” Fanny Blankers-Koen, defeated the Englishwoman, Maureen Gardner, in a photo finish. The entire experience of the games was an inspiration that hasn’t faded.

JKP: Is it true that you were one of London’s first joggers? Can we also put that down to the influence of the ’48 Olympics?

PL: Jogging is the right term. I was never able to do anything I could describe as running. The desire was there, but not the performance. So I shuffled along the streets, kidding myself that it would turn me into an athlete. And, yes, I dreamed of moving like my idol from the Olympics, [Emil] Zátopek. His reward had been a gold medal. Mine was sore shins and bruised heels. By now you’re thinking this is all very touching, but what in the name of Agatha does it have to do with crime writing? Hang on and I’ll come to it.

JKP: You attended the University of Reading, from which you received a B.A. Honors in English in 1958. Had you always been an exceptional student?

PL: “Exceptional student” I was not. Thanks to a new government initiative, mine was the first generation to attend university with financial aid. It beat working for a living, so I applied for a Fine Art course and switched to English after the first year. My main achievement was meeting a beautiful psychology student called Jackie [Lewis]. After completing my degree, I wrote to my professor of English asking for a reference and he wrote back: “You will now admit that you did no work at all.” He wasn’t far wrong.

JKP: After graduating, you became a teacher, first at Thurrock Technical College, then Hammersmith College. Is that right? What subject(s) were you lecturing on, and for how long?

PL: Before that I had to do national service (1958-61). I was a pilot officer and then a flying officer [with the Royal Air Force], but didn’t once get off the ground because I was in the education branch. Thankfully the money was good and I married Jackie and we lived well in Hereford, known for its succulent steaks. After the RAF I took the Thurrock job and taught English Language and Literature and something known as Liberal Studies that nobody could define. I moved to Hammersmith College in 1969 as Head of General Education, and remained in the job until 1975, when my earnings from writing were enough to allow me to take the plunge into full-time.

JKP: Were you at all sorry to leave the teaching sphere?

PL: No. Nothing beats writing.

JKP: Then in 1969, you entered a first crime novel contest sponsored by publisher Macmillan. You’d penned one book previous to this time, a non-fiction work called The Kings of Distance (aka Five Kings of Distance), but never a novel. Yet you won that competition (and the £1,000 prize) with Wobble to Death, the book that introduced Sergeant Cribb. Were you astounded to have triumphed so?

PL: To tell it right, I’d channeled my passion for running into writing while I was doing the teaching, first for a magazine and then the book about distance running. Getting into print was a huge boost. The Kings of Distance didn’t sell many copies, but it was named as sports book of 1968 by World Sports magazine. Even so, I couldn’t think of another subject I could write about until I saw an advert in The Times for a first crime novel competition and the prize was bigger than my annual salary. I was tempted to try, but I knew little about the craft of writing whodunits. Fortunately, Jax (she morphed from Jackie into Jax) was a keen reader and she suggested a story based on running would be something new. I recalled that while I was researching the running book I’d come across accounts of ultra-long-distance races in the Victorian era called “Go As You Please Contests.” This, surely, would be something different as a setting. It had to be written quickly, in just over three months. We introduced strychnine (a drug used as a stimulant by Victorian runners) and some murders and a couple of detectives called Cribb and Thackeray. It was entitled Wobble to Death and it won the prize. And, yes, I went straight to Cloud Nine.

Introduction to the Cribb TV series.

JKP: That first Cribb investigation combined two interests of yours--sports, as you say, and the Victorian era. I read somewhere that you first became interested in the late 19th century while doing research into the career of an American Indian who had been a famous runner in Britain during that period. Is that right? And was that Native American Deerfoot, about whom you wrote in The Kings of Distance? What made Deerfoot, also known as Lewis Bennett, so interesting?

PL: I sometimes think Deerfoot is my guardian spirit. His portrait hangs in my study watching me as I write. Years before I wrote anything, I picked up a secondhand copy of a tiny almanac called The Sporting Chronicle Annual and in it was a picture of this Native American Seneca runner who came to England in 1861 and challenged the best British professionals. He was a sensation. He won regularly, of course, and set records no one would approach for many years after. Huge crowds came to watch him as he toured the country, running bare-chested. He stayed for two years, dined with the Prince of Wales and revitalized the sport of pedestrianism, as it was known. He was the first of my “Kings of Distance” and the inspiration that got me going.

JKP: One of the curious things about the prim Victorian Age is that, as you’ve said before, it was easier back then to murder your wife or husband than to divorce her/him. Is that why there were so many males killers and female poisoners during that era?

PL: Did I say that? Well, there was a stigma about divorce that lasted well into the 20th century. A divorcée was someone you wouldn’t invite to dinner. And divorce was made difficult. Cruelty or adultery couldn’t easily be proved. It’s true to say that some of the women poisoners were trapped in marriages from which there was no obvious escape. The threat of scandal in the Victorian era was immense. But of course there were other motives that have largely disappeared with the passing of time. A woman’s property became her husband’s on marriage. Blackmail for a variety of scandalous acts was a big hazard if you were outside the norm. Mental illness was shaming. All of this provides rich material for mystery writers, but blighted many lives.

JKP: Cribb was a rather different character from many fictional Victorian detectives, more rough around the edges and less eloquent than, say, Sherlock Holmes. Were you deliberately trying to change the image of Victorian sleuths?

PL: In choosing a sleuth, I was looking for realism, so I steered clear of amateur or private detectives. I wanted someone with the authority of the police, an ordinary, astute detective, credible as an investigator and working within the limitations of the time. Fingerprints weren’t in use and forensic medicine was not much more than toxicology. He needed to get to the truth mainly by question and answer.

JKP: How important were class differences among 19th-century English policemen? Was it possible for someone of a lower social rank to achieve higher office, or were those positions reserved for people such as Cribb’s superior, Chief Inspector Jowett--men of family means and with military backgrounds, but who boasted less crime-solving experience than many of the coppers on the beat?

PL: Almost without exception the Scotland Yard detectives were intelligent working-class men who came up through the ranks, and this was true of [Frederick] Abberline and his colleagues on the [Jack the] Ripper case. But the high-ups were often ex-army officers like Sir Charles Warren, with his theory about bloodhounds that was exposed as such a fiasco in 1888.

JKP: Arthur Conan Doyle wasn’t the only person who perceived the police force in Victorian London as incompetent. Could that bumbling be traced to the fact that many of the people in charge at Scotland Yard hadn’t come up through the ranks?

PL: It’s too sweeping to call them all incompetent. They had some successes in other cases and killers were brought regularly before the courts. The Yard men were often sent out of London to assist the rural police, who really were in difficulty. But of course they didn’t have the technical back-up of modern detectives. Also there was corruption--which was ever thus in police work.

JKP: You penned eight Sergeant Cribb novels, beginning with Wobble to Death and concluding with Waxwork, that last tale set during the spring of 1888--mere months before Saucy Jack commenced his reign of terror. Why end the Cribb series there? Did you not wish to tell more stories after 1888, when the British public lost faith in Scotland Yard, due to its inability to catch the Ripper? Or was there another reason why you moved on?

PL: As the Cribb series got about in Britain and America I thought about giving up the day job. There was interest from Carl Foreman (of High Noon fame) in filming Wobble to Death. With encouragement from Jax, I resigned [from teaching] in 1975 and have made a living from novels ever since. But at the time I doubted whether I could carry on forever writing Victorian mysteries. Between books in the Cribb series, I wrote a book called Goldengirl (1977) using the pen-name Peter Lear and projecting what might happen if an American woman athlete were to become the favorite to win three gold medals at the upcoming Olympics in Moscow. It was about the exploitation of a natural talent. Hollywood bought it and the movie was made starring Susan Anton and James Coburn. I was paid enough money to justify trying new things in the mystery field. By this time I’d already written Waxwork. The fact that this book was set in 1888, the year of Jack the Ripper, was pure coincidence.


Trailer for the 1979 film Goldengirl.

JKP: Even though you ceased penning books about them, you did offer a few new cases to Cribb and Thackeray in the 1980-1981 ITV series Cribb. And you wrote about them again in at least one short story (“Razor Bill”). Have you never since thought about building another novel around that wonderful, often funny pair?

PL: Television came along when a review of Waxwork in Time magazine was spotted by June Wyndham-Davies, a Granada producer. It went out at Christmas 1979 with the inspired starring of Alan Dobie. They then commissioned all the other seven books for a series that sold to PBS and many other countries and was ITV’s biggest export in 1980. Jax and I were commissioned to write six new scripts. We quickly used up the few ideas I had for future Cribb books. In a way it drew a line under Sergeant Cribb. I wanted to try different things in writing. More than 30 years on, I doubt whether I could recapture the character as he was conceived.

JKP: You never gave Cribb a first name in the books. But years ago, I asked you in an interview what you thought his first name should’ve been. You answered “Archibald.” Is that still your thinking today?

PL: Spot on. In one of the books his name is written with the initial “A.” Archie was and always will be his first name, though not many people know it.*

JKP: After ending the Cribb series, you went on to compose a succession of standalone mysteries, among them The False Inspector Dew, Keystone, and Rough Cider--all historical tales. And yet the standalone I have heard you’re most proud of is The Reaper, a modern-day yarn featuring a deliciously impious rector, the Reverend Otis Joy. What makes that black comedy such a standout for you? And did it affect your future writing somehow?

PL: All of these stories are a break with the classical whodunit tradition that my series books are locked into. Periodically, I like to write from the point of view of the killer. The personable killer has always fascinated me more than the out-and-out villain. When you start a book you have an idea of how it should turn out. In The Reaper, I wanted to persuade the reader to be in there with Otis Joy, willing him along each step of his wicked way. Most readers--even members of the clergy--tell me I succeeded.

To answer your last question, it was a one-off, and doesn’t influence me, unless it’s subconscious.

JKP: The Reaper is an example of an “inverted mystery,” in which the reader is told whodunit early on, and the trick is to see how long he or she can remain at large after the crime has been committed. Why did you want to try your hand at such a tale?

PL: In Britain we had a serial murderer in a position of trust who was finally caught about the time I was planning this book. Dr. Harold Shipman was convicted of killing 15 of his patients for their money and was said by the police to have murdered as many as 200 more, yet even after his conviction many of his patients refused to believe in his guilt and insisted he was charming and caring. This got me thinking about people who are so trusted that they can kill with impunity.

JKP: Trading further on your reputation for producing sharply plotted but often-amusing historical mysteries, in 1987 you witnessed the publication of Bertie and the Tinman, the first of three novels starring Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales. Had you long harbored an interest in Bertie? And how did you come up with the notion of making him an amateur detective?

PL: I recruited Bertie almost as an afterthought. When writing the Victorian books, I always started with a theme, often some form of entertainment. I’d never written about horse-racing, but Dick Francis did it brilliantly with contemporary characters, so why not try one in a 19th-century setting? I read all I could about the sport of kings and came across the strange story of the sudden suicide of Fred Archer, the royal jockey, whose last words before pulling the trigger were, “Are they coming?” How I could I resist? And how could Bertie, the owner he rode for, resist? It was obvious that I must turn Bertie into an amateur sleuth. One reviewer called it “Dick Francis by Gaslight.”

JKP: Is it true that you’d planned Bertie and the Tinman as a one-off, but were convinced to write two more books about him?

PL: Yes, it was fun being Bertie, writing in the first-person. He was uniquely well-placed to be a sleuth, because he had the power to call for Scotland Yard’s help if he wished or, equally, to command them to keep out of it. The joke was that he was totally inept and the mysteries got solved despite his chaotic efforts. Bertie and the Seven Bodies [1990] was my tribute to Agatha Christie in her centenary year, with a killing each day of the week and a familiar rhyme providing clues. Bertie and the Crime of Passion [1993] took him to Paris with Sarah Bernhardt. He really did once appear on stage with her, acting as a corpse.

JKP: There seem to be a great number of mystery novels nowadays starring real-life characters. Do you find this to be an interesting trend? Or has it been overdone already?

PL: A matter of taste, isn’t it? The writer has to be true to the personality to make it credible.

JKP: What was your original conception of Inspector Peter Diamond, and how do you think he has measured up to your expectations?

PL: Calling him “The Last Detective,” I made him one of the old-school of police sleuths, resisting the teamwork that characterizes modern investigation. Having a central character who does all the active detective work and deduction is impossible in the real world, but all crime writers have to contrive some way of fixing it if their protagonist is to satisfy the reader. Diamond is difficult to work with, clumsy, accident-prone, but has integrity. This is why he has survived 14 books.

JKP: Diamond faced a variety of difficulties during the first books in this series, not the least of which were that he had to find a way back into law enforcement, after storming out of CID, and later lost his beloved wife, Stephanie, to a sniper. But lately he has had an easier time of it. He has a regular girlfriend and seems to have curbed his temper to some degree. Did you always want the man to find a peaceful groove and settle in?

PL: In the first book, I had the unnerving experience of being sidelined by my own creation. At the point when he resigned, it was borne in on me that this strong personality wouldn’t take a reprimand for an offense he felt was excusable. So he quit. I was left with the difficulty first of solving the mystery in a way that still brought him credit, and later of getting him back into the police. It took two books to do it.

The murder of his wife was devastating for him and many of my readers. I’m often asked how I could have done this. I answer that the series would have come to an early end if I hadn’t presented Diamond with a life-changing challenge. The books were getting too cozy, too predictable, and I would have become tired of the character. Maybe it’s happening again …

JKP: One of the things the Peter Diamond series offers you is an ensemble of sorts. Rather than just a single main cop or two detectives, you get to play with a whole cast. Has that provided you opportunities you wanted in character development?

PL: Yes. It’s a nod to Ed McBain, who made the police procedural work. My work won’t stand comparison with his, but I can see the strengths of a group of detectives interacting and achieving.

JKP: If there’s anyone on Diamond’s CID team that seems to attract your attention most, it’s Detective Sergeant Ingeborg Smith, an attractive young former journalist. She’s been given the opportunity to distinguish herself from the group over the last few books. Was this a planned effort on your part to highlight her skills and activities, to give her a larger role? Or did the character demand that herself?

PL: Ingeborg is clearly brighter than anyone and develops as a detective, getting promoted and taking on a bigger role as Diamond gets more confident. She’d better watch out. One of her predecessors was the likeable Julie Hargreaves, who gets pissed off with Diamond and asks for a transfer. Losing Ingeborg would be another major challenge for Diamond.

JKP: How much of a book like The Stone Wife do you have figured out before you begin writing? Or do you just start, and have faith that things will fall into place as you go along?

PL: These days I’m more relaxed about the plot than I used to be. Early on, I would write an outline, chapter by chapter. But I still have a broad idea of how it will pan out and what the surprises are. I’m not a meticulous plotter preparing clues and laying red herrings, but I like to have some key moments that defy expectation.

JKP: One of the things fiction-writing invites you to do is explore subjects you knew little about, and perhaps as a consequence, develop longstanding interests in those topics. Have you found specific instances of that during your own career?

PL: Tell me about it! That’s one of the joys. I read an article by a member of a famous string quartet saying it was amazing that the four of them hadn’t actually murdered each other--and that was enough to inspire The Tooth Tattoo [2013], about a deadly string quartet with a residence in Bath Spa University. I’m no musician, but my universe expanded.

(Right) The author today.

JKP: In addition to writing about Peter Diamond, you penned two novels in the last decade about cigar-smoking DCI Henrietta “Hen” Mallin, The Circle (2005) and The Headhunters (2008). But the latter came out six years ago. Do you have any plans to resurrect Mallin in a future novel?

PL: Hen Mallin makes her reappearance in the next Diamond book [Down Among the Dead Men], out in 2015.

JKP: I’ve heard before that you weren’t a big reader of crime and mystery fiction prior to sitting down and composing Wobble to Death, that you’d only read a bit of Christie, Charteris, and Ian Fleming. Have your reading tastes changed since, or is your wife, Jax, still the big mystery reader in your family?

PL: I’m more clued up than I was. When I meet other writers I’m usually interested to get to know their work. Through the Detection Club, the Crime Writers’ Association, and the Mystery Writers of America, I’ve met many, so my shelves are overloaded and dipping in the middle. As for Jax, she is a linguist and devotes much of her reading time to some new language. If it’s crime, all well and good, but it has to be in Chinese, French, or Italian.

JKP: Books by which writers in this genre do you most enjoy?

PL: My all-time favorite is Donald E. Westlake in his several identities. He was a staunch friend, too, who once cast me as “Hyman Card of Scotland Yard” in one of his murder mystery weekends at Mohonk Mountain House, in New York. Who else? McBain, [Patricia] Highsmith, [Lawrence] Block, [Graham] Greene, [John] le Carré, [Colin] Dexter, and Doyle.

JKP: Weren’t you responsible for ensuring that Leslie Charteris was given the Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger commendation in 1992? How did that come about?

PL: It’s a committee decision, and one that delighted me because it brought me full circle, with a chance to honor the man whose work introduced me to crime fiction. He wrote back, “At my age (84) it calls for considerable audacity to promise to do anything so far as eight months ahead, but I will take a chance and say that if I am alive and kicking on May 7 next year I shall be most humbly happy to accept the honor which you have so unexpectedly offered me.” He was terrific on the day, speaking without a note, and with great humor. In my turn, I was most humbly happy to meet him. Within a few more months, he passed away.

JKP: Sergeant Cribb made a fine showing on the small screen, but your other stories have found only limited interest among TV and film producers. As you said before, your novel Goldengirl was made into a 1979 science-fiction flick starring Susan Anton, and On the Edge (1989) was brought to television as Dead Gorgeous. You served as a “story consultant” (whatever that means) on the 2003-2007 ITV mystery series Rosemary & Thyme. And I understand that Peter Falk (of Columbo fame) paid you a six-figure sum for rights to The False Inspector Dew, but never did anything with that as far as filming goes. Have you been surprised that so many of your stories have won critical acclaim, but failed to attract attention from film and TV producers?

PL: All writers will tell you of their dalliance with the film and TV people. Sometimes it comes off, but more often it doesn’t. So much has to fall into place at the crucial time. You don’t count on anything, but cash the check quickly when it happens. I had a number of unforgettable lunches with Carl Foreman and Peter Falk, and I count it as a privilege to have spent time with such giants of the entertainment business. By the way, “story consultant” is the best of all jobs, because you read other people’s scripts and make suggestions and get to all the parties, as well as being paid well.

JKP: Do you still hope to bring Peter Diamond to the screen?

PL: He’s probably closer to it than he’s ever been, but I don’t want to jinx the project.

* Lovesey provided a bit more information about Cribb’s name in his 1981 cover letter: “Cribb is called Wally--short for Walter, I think--in Wobble to Death, but he signs something ‘A. Cribb’ in Waxwork. Let’s say that he was probably given the names Archibald Walter and prefers the latter.”

READ MORE: “Peter Lovesey Rides Again with The Stone Wife,” by NancyO (The Crime Segments).

Pierce’s Picks: “Cop to Corpse”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Cop to Corpse, by Peter Lovesey (Soho Crime):
Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond has never been even close to the most popular fellow in British police circles. But he comes in for particular derision in Cop to Corpse, the fine sequel to last year’s Stagestruck. A sniper is on the loose around the historic spa town of Bath, and there seems to be only one type of target in his (or her) sights: cops. Police Constable Harry Tracker has just become the third officer to fall in several weeks, killed with a clean shot to the head. Previous efforts to find the elusive assassin and terminate this bloody rampage have been bungled, so Diamond is called in to help. Whilst trampling the toes of a pompous rival who’s claimed the investigation as his own, the caustic but competent Diamond begins to develop some theories about the murders after he talks with the widows of the dead officers. His most controversial suggestion: that the killer might be another policeman. Relegated to crutches after a frightening encounter with an unidentified motorcyclist, Diamond struggles to hold onto the trust and loyalty of his own squad as he races to capture the so-called Somerset Sniper before more deadly shots can be fired.