Elizabeth George

Writer

• Born: February 26, 1949
• Place of Birth: Warren, Ohio

Biography

Born in Warren, Ohio, on February 26, 1949, (Susan) Elizabeth George is the daughter of Robert Edwin and Anne Rivelle George. Her father was a salesperson; her mother, a nurse. She grew up in California, studying at Foothill Community College in Los Altos Hills and graduating from the University of California in Riverside with a B.A. in English. She received a master’s degree in counseling and psychology from California State University at Fullerton. She began high school teaching but was fired from her first job at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana for union activity. She next taught at El Toro High School in El Toro, California, where she won a teacher of the year award from the Orange County Department of Education. In 1971, she married businessman Ira Jay Toibin; they were divorced in 1995. She later married Tom McCabe, a retired firefighter.

While George continues to teach writing seminars, she quit high school teaching after selling her first novel, A Great Deliverance, in 1988. In that book, she established her principal characters and the English environment in which her later novels would be set. Her detective is Thomas Lynley, an aristocratic, Oxford-educated Scotland Yard inspector. He is assisted by a working-class sergeant, Barbara Havers. Simon St. James, a forensic scientist, is a secondary male figure; he is married to Deborah, who was once involved with Lynley. Lady Helen Clyde is Lynley’s love, who later becomes his wife. In an interview for Speaking of Murder: Interviews with Masters of Mystery and Suspense (1998), George described her primary concern as relationships, but her notion of relationships is complex. Not only do the relationships among these four characters change as the series of novels progresses, but the primary characters sometimes are related to the themes of individual novels. In Missing Joseph (1993), Deborah St. James’s desire for motherhood mirrors the obsessive need for parenthood that leads another character to murder. Often, characters are related to the particular English landscape in which they exist, as is the killer of In the Presence of the Enemy (1996).

George is unusual among crime writers in the attention she gives to parent-child relationships and the care she takes to fully develop young characters, especially those victimized or destroyed as a result of parental neglect, ambition, greed, or hypocrisy. In Playing for the Ashes (1994), two adolescents are scarred by a father’s dreams of playing cricket and a schoolteacher mother’s desire for control. In For the Sake of Elena (1992), a deaf college student is the victim of her father’s desire to deny her handicap and create the image of an ideal family. Two young children are the kidnapping victims of In the Presence of the Enemy, both left vulnerable by parental ambition and hypocrisy. Because of detailed character development, the reader knows more about these children than the fictional parents ever did. In Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life (2004), George discusses these novels in depth to show the methods that made them possible. George won Anthony and Agatha awards and the French Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for A Great Deliverance and a German MIMI for Well-Schooled in Murder (1990).

George has continued to release titles in the Inspector Lynley Mystery series. In the twenty-first century, these include A Traitor to Memory (2001), A Place of Hiding (2003), With No One as Witness (2005), What Came before He Shot Her (2006), Careless in Red (2009), This Body of Death (2010), Believing the Lie (2012), Just One Evil Act (2013), and A Banquet of Consequences (2015). The Inspector Lynley Mysteries were adapted into a BBC television series of the same name, which was aired in the United States on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater between 2001 and 2007. George continued her Inspector Lynley series into the 2020s, publishing The Punishment She Deserves in 2018 and Something to Hide in 2022.

In addition to the Inspector Lynley Mysteries, George has also written a young adult fiction series set on Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle, Washington. As of 2016, the three books in the series are The Edge of Nowhere (2012), The Edge of the Water (2014), and The Edge of Shadows (2015). Her adult short fiction titles include The Evidence Exposed (1999), I, Richard (2002), and A Moment on the Edge (2004). She also published the nonfiction work Mastering the Process: From Idea to Novel in 2020. In 2024, George spoke at the Hoover Public Library as part of the 2024 Southern Voices Festival.

Bibliography

Anderson, Jon. "British Crime Novelist Elizabeth George Kicks Off 2024 Southern Voices Festival." Hoover Sun, 23 Feb. 2024, hooversun.com/peopleplaces/author-elizabeth-george-kicks-off-2024-southern-voices-festi/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Elizabeth George Online. Elizabeth George, n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

Garson, Helen S. “Elizabeth George.” Critical Survey of Mystery & Detective Fiction Rev. ed. Ipswich: Salem, 2008. 1–3. Literary Reference Center. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

Pohl, Kathy. “Demystifying the Writing Process: Just as She Has Solved the Most Puzzling Murder Mysteries, Author Elizabeth George Has Tried to Take the Mystery Out of Writing.” Writer 120.6 (2007): 20–22. Literary Reference Center. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

Smith, Zack. “Elizabeth George Talks Inspector Lynley, Not Being British, and More.” Indy Week. Indy Week, 19 Oct. 2013. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

Tivnan, Tom. “Elizabeth George.” Bookseller 9 Aug. 2013: 24–25. Literary Reference Center. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.