Nancy Livingston
Nancy Livingston, born Jane Woolsey on November 18, 1935, in Stockton-on-Tees, England, was a multifaceted actress, writer, and television producer. She began her career in the arts in 1952 as a stage and television actress, later transitioning to various roles including a secretary and an airline stewardess. In the 1960s, she moved into television production, where she also began to write scripts for television and radio. Livingston is best known for her humorous murder mystery series featuring the character Mr. G. D. H. Pringle, a retired tax inspector turned sleuth, and his companion Mavis Bignall. Her debut novel in this series, "The Trouble at Aquitaine," won the Crime Writers' Association Poisoned Chalice Award, establishing her reputation in the mystery genre. Beyond mysteries, she wrote historical sagas that explored the lives of working-class families through changing times. A member of the Crime Writers' Association, Livingston served as vice-chairman from 1991 to 1992. She passed away in 1994, leaving behind a legacy of engaging narratives that reflect both humor and social commentary.
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Subject Terms
Nancy Livingston
Fiction Writer and Playwright
- Born: November 18, 1935
- Birthplace: Stockton-on-Tees, County Cleveland, England
- Died: 1994
Biography
Nancy Livingston was born as Jane Woolsey on November 18, 1935, in Stockton-on-Tees, County Cleveland, England, the daughter of tax inspector Harry William Woolsey and homemaker Frances Hewitt Woolsey. She was educated at Miss Wilkinson’s Academy for Gentlewomen and earned an ALAM degree with honors from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
Woolsey began her career as a stage and television actress in 1952, performing with Harry Hanson’s Court Players. In 1954, she became a secretary at the Manchester Guardian, and later worked in a similar capacity at F. Smith’s Copper Wire Factory in Salford. She switched occupations in 1960, serving for six years as an airline stewardess for BOAC.
Woolsey changed jobs again in 1966, serving as a television production assistant for Tyne Tees Television in Newcastle (1966-1968) and for ATV in Elstree, Hertfordshire (1968-1983). It was during her tenure in television that she first began writing, producing a television script, The Work of Giants, as well as a number of radio plays, including Alice’s Ashes and Slimming Down. In 1985, while working in broadcasting, she also married David Edward Foster, a television director and producer.
Woolsey’s foray into full-length fiction was late and brief, lasting but a decade. While working as a freelance producer for independent television companies in London (1983-1989), she created—obviously drawing upon her own family history—the Mr. G. D. H. Pringle series of humorous murder mysteries for which she is best known. Written as Nancy Livingston, the books feature retired tax inspector Pringle as a sleuth. A slender, stooped, elderly man with a moustache and spectacles, the modest and methodical Mr. Pringle is assisted in his crime-solving efforts by his much younger and considerably more flamboyant girlfriend, the shapely barmaid Mavis Bignall.
Mr. Pringle and Mavis first set forth in The Trouble at Aquitaine, investigating a murder at an eight-hundred-year-old castle converted into a health facility. Subsequently, the odd couple embarked on an almost annual basis in seven additional novels set throughout the sharply observed English countryside (such as Fatality at Bath and Wells and Mayhem in Parva) and occasionally on foreign soil (Unwillingly to Vegas). Livingston’s first entry, The Trouble at Aquitaine, received the Crime Writers’ Association Poisoned Chalice Award, and a later offering, Death in a Distant Land, was honored with the Punch award.
Livingston simultaneously penned a number of historical sagas dealing primarily with working-class families. These books demonstrated how ordinary folks are affected by the changing times. The richly detailed generational epics include The Far Side of the Hill and its sequel, The Land of Our Dreams, Never Were Such Times, and Two Sisters. Livingston also infrequently contributed articles, novellas, and short stories to such anthologies as Second Culprit (1993) and Midwinter Mysteries (volumes 3 and 4; 1993 and 1994).
A member of the Crime Writers’ Association and vice chairman of the organization from 1991 to 1992, Nancy Livingston, née Jane Woolsey, died in 1994.