Peter Lovesey's Books

Biography

Born at home in a semi-detached house in suburban southwest London in 1936, Peter Lovesey was a child of the Second World War. One of his earliest memories was being collected from school and told that a flying bomb had destroyed his house. Miraculously both his brothers escaped unharmed as they had crawled under a table shelter. His neighbours were not so lucky.

“We had to rely on charity for some time after, and there were only two books for me to read: one was about a famous criminal lawyer called Sir Edward Marshall Hall; the other was Alias the Saint … For some while. I avoided reading the second, thinking a saint with a name like Alias must be boring. (Well, I was only nine years old). Then I discovered it was by Leslie Charteris, so I read my first crime novel and loved it.” (Crimespree)

An Interest in Sport

At school, Lovesey craved status, though this was only won on the sports field and, by his own admission, Lovesey lacked athletic talent. He became an encyclopaedia of sporting knowledge to ingratiate himself with the other children. He was one of those children who couldn’t run but knew which athletes had won every race.

Teaching

Lovesey studied Fine Art, History and English, and in the late 1950s, he completed his National Service in the Royal Air Force. He then had a fourteen-year career in education, teaching English at schools and colleges in and around London. While he enjoyed his interactions with students, he was less enthusiastic about the bureaucracy.

“There’s so much paperwork, so many committee meetings, to the extent that it distracts from the real business of teaching” (Peter Lovesey)

Deciding teaching wasn’t for him, Lovesey built on his love of athletics and turned his hand to sports writing. He submitted articles to magazines and then hit on the idea of writing about sports history. In 1968 he published his first book, The Kings of Distance which told the history of distance running. While it wasn’t a huge seller (there are only so many long-distance running buffs), it gave Lovesey his first taste of critical acclaim. World Sports named it Sports Book of the Year.

The Writing Competition

The following year Lovesey’s wife, Jax, spotted a competition in The Times. The publisher Macmillan was trying to build a crime fiction business. They offered a £1,000 prize for the best novel from an unpublished writer. The prize was big money, more than Lovesey’s annual salary, so spurred on by his wife, he submitted his first crime novel – Wobble to Death. Wobbles were Victorian ultra-distance, 6-day races.

“They seemed very bizarre and extraordinary, involving all kinds of tricks that trainers and runners would use to try to hamper their opponents… They would put laxatives in the refreshments, crush walnut shells into competitors’ shoes…” (Peter Lovesey)

The early competitors also took strychnine in small doses as a performance-enhancing drug.

Sergeant Cribbs

Lovesey weaved a little rivalry, a couple of murders and a Victorian detective, Sergeant Cribbs, into his story and won the prize. Delighted by his winnings, Lovesey was surprised by the expectation that he would write a follow-on. Ultimately he wrote another seven Cribbs novels, exploiting his knowledge of Victorian sports and past times. Jerome K Jerome’s 1889 novel Three Men in a Boat inspired Swing, Swing Together. Surprisingly such a quintessentially British past-time as rowing on the Thames won the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.

The Sergeant Cribb series was so popular that Granada TV bought the rights to the books and turned them into a television series. After filming all eight novels, they commissioned another six scripts.

“You don’t turn down an offer like that. I came home triumphantly and told Jax about it. She asked me when the company wanted the stories, reminding me that writing a book took me about a year. They wanted six plots in eight months!” (Peter Lovesey)

Lovesey’s wife Jax waded in to help, and they turned out the scripts between them. Jax Lovesey received a writing credit for her efforts.

That, however, was the end of Sergeant Cribbs. Seeing his work on TV and exploiting every idea he had for the extra episodes killed Lovesey’s desire to write more about the Victorian detective.

Historical Crime Novels

Instead, Lovesey turned his attention to a string of other historical crime novels. His heroes included Bertie – Albert, Prince of Wales, an incompetent amateur detective with the power to call on Scotland Yard.

The most critically acclaimed of Peter Lovesey’s books, The False Inspector Dew, is a tale of murder on an ocean liner steaming between Southampton and New York. The idea came to Lovesey after reading the story of Gay Gibson, a British actress murdered on a voyage between Cape Town and Southampton in 1947. The British Crime Writer’s Association shortlisted it for their Dagger of Daggers award. Peter Lovesey wrote historical crime novels years before Ellis Peters popularised them.

Contemporary Crime

In 1991 Lovesey wrote his first contemporary novel, introducing Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond. Originally intended as a one-off, Diamond resigned from the police at the end of the book, hence the title, The Last Detective. It was so popular that Lovesey had to back peddle hard to have Diamond reinstated. In 2021, in his 85th year, Lovesey published the 20th Diamond novel.

Style

Lovesey wasn’t a big crime or mystery reader as a child; he credits his wife’s enthusiasm for the genre as the starting point of his career. Peter Lovesey’s books emulate the style of the writers of the golden age of detective fiction. Lovesey creates classical British mystery puzzles. His novels are short on gore, long on humour, clues, and suspects and contain some of the most spectacular plot twists you will ever read.

Ultimately the Crime Writer’s Association elected Peter Lovesey as their president. By chance, this allowed him to present a Diamond Dagger to Leslie Charteris, the author of Alias the Saint, the first crime novel that Lovesey ever read.