Peter Dickinson

• Born: December 16, 1927
• Place of birth: Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now in Zambia)
• Died: December 16, 2015
• Place of death: Winchester, England

Types of Plot: Police procedural; psychological; historical

Principal Series: James Pibble, 1968–79

Contribution

The first of Peter Dickinson’s James Pibble series, Skin Deep (1968)—published in the United States under the title The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest—signaled the emergence of a major, if offbeat, talent. Even before he finished with the Pibble series, Dickinson had begun writing non-series crime novels, many of them with historical settings. One of the most stylistically innovative writers in the field, Dickinson often tested or redefined the boundaries of crime fiction. His characters are unconventional, his settings are exotic or deliberately disturbing, and his plots, especially in the later non-series novels, vie with mainstream fiction in their complex juxtapositions of past and present. Although Pibble is too eccentric a police officer to have inspired many imitators, Dickinson’s non-series novels may justly be compared with those of his contemporary Ruth Rendell for their creative blurring of the distinctions between crime writing and mainstream fiction, thus clearing fresh ground for the generation of writers who followed.

Biography

Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson was born in Livingston, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), on December 16, 1927, to English parents. His father was a British civil servant. Dickinson has written fondly of his childhood in Africa. In 1935 his family returned to Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, England.

In 1940 Dickinson entered Eton, a prestigious English preparatory school. He did military service just after World War II, then attended King’s College, Cambridge, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1951. Dickinson worked as an editor and book reviewer for Punch magazine for seventeen years, after which he turned to writing fiction full time.

Completed when Dickinson was almost forty, Skin Deep won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger award for best crime novel of 1968. It was Dickinson's first novel as well as the first in the James Pibble series. (The same year, he published The Weathermonger, a science-fiction novel for children.) In 1969 Dickinson won the Gold Dagger a second time for A Pride of Heroes (1969; US title, The Old English Peep Show), the second in the series. In addition, Dickinson has won several awards for his work as a writer of children’s fiction, including the 1979 Whitbread Book Award for best children's book for his novel Tulku (1979).

Peter Dickinson married Mary Rose Barnard in 1953. The couple had four children, two daughters and two sons, one of whom is the young adult author John Dickinson. After Barnard's death in 1988, Dickinson was married again, to fantasy and children's author Robin McKinley. The couple remained together until Dickinson's death on December 16, 2015, his eighty-eighth birthday.

Analysis

Peter Dickinson’s Pibble novels, while they may be classified technically as police procedurals, do not fit comfortably into that niche. Pibble is a Scotland Yard detective, but unlike the more conventional detectives of the genre, he generally works alone, and his investigations do not consistently adhere to realistic police methods. Although Pibble does a fair amount of evidence gathering, fingerprinting, and so on, he more often than not solves his cases by way of inspired leaps of intuition underlaid by a subtle and painstaking process of deduction.

A more radical distinction may be drawn between the character of Pibble and the police detectives of the golden age of crime fiction that preceded World War II: the somewhat dimwitted plodders, such as Agatha Christie’s Inspector Battle, forever outclassed by the brilliance of Hercule Poirot, or the idealized and heroic police detectives who, like Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Roderick Alleyn, are often from aristocratic backgrounds. Pibble conforms to neither type. He is from a lower-middle-class background and is far from heroic in any conventional sense, but he is neither dimwitted nor plodding; he is possessed of a retentive memory for details, is well read and an avid crossword puzzler, and often displays flashes of intuitive brilliance. Nevertheless, he frequently makes mistakes and, partly because of class insecurities, allows himself to be bullied by others, both police associates and suspects. Because Pibble is one of the most introspective investigators in the history of the police procedural, his thoughts and perceptions are at times labyrinthine as the reader follows him, often stumbling and seemingly lost, toward a final solution. Thus Pibble is to some extent a deliberate inversion of the heroic golden age model of the police detective.

Although the character of Pibble himself is the most distinguishing feature of the series, Dickinson’s crime scenes, which are often so bizarre as to verge on the surrealistic, are also notable. In Skin Deep, for example, a small group of New Guineans are resettled in a London house, where their chief is brutally murdered. Dickinson cleverly interweaves the story of Pibble’s investigation of the murder with the story of the group’s life in New Guinea and the events leading up to their migration to England. Equally unconventional is the fourth novel in the series, Sleep and His Brother (1971), in which a recently retired Pibble is drawn into a series of baffling events occurring on the premises of a country house near London, now remodeled and serving as an institution for the care of children suffering from a rare disease that may also produce paranormal powers.

Although it is difficult to generalize about Dickinson’s non-series mysteries, most of them may be loosely classified as historical fiction. Typically, they begin in the present but seek to unravel some mystery—usually a murder—that remains hidden in the past. Often, the past that these elegant mysteries explore is the period of the golden age of crime fiction, and the setting for these hidden crimes is a country house reminiscent of the country-house settings of golden age fiction. However, whereas authors such as Christie and Marsh portrayed that world as essentially static and its hierarchical social world still intact, Dickinson reconstructed the same world from a post–World War II perspective, allowing signs of its disintegration to become more apparent. Most representative of these historical reconstructions is The Last House-Party (1982), much of which is set in a country manor.

Skin Deep

In the first Pibble novel, the ants referred to in the US title (The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest) are a small tribe of New Guineans called the Ku. The reasons for their removal to England are revealed in fragments as the novel unfolds, in part through the narrative of Dr. Eve Ku, the English daughter of a missionary to New Guinea, who grew up there and has become a member of the tribe. Before the tribe was removed from New Guinea during World War II, its members had almost all become Christians, and the degree to which the men of the tribe have accepted a Christian and more “civilized” way of life in England is a thematic issue that Dickinson explores at some length. Dr. Ku, whom the tribe regards as a man, is an anthropologist and is working on a study of the tribe’s customs. Thus her position in the tribe is ambiguous; she is both participant in and observer of the customs she studies.

One aspect of the novel that readers may consider to be a weakness is that the solution to the murder of the chief, Aaron, is only tangentially related to its anthropological theme. This potential weakness is offset somewhat by the fact that the men of the tribe become major suspects in the investigation when Pibble discovers that they have secretly begun to resurrect their traditional religious practices, largely involving the ritual invocation of an almost forgotten tribal god. The tribe’s chief, Aaron, a firm convert to Christianity, had opposed such practices. The other men, Pibble suspects, may have conspired to murder Aaron to remove the primary obstacle to their attempt to preserve their ancient religious beliefs. Thus much of the investigation points toward a solution to the crime that would have been intrinsic to the tribal conflicts whose depiction lies at the thematic center of the novel. However, Dickinson eschews such a logical solution for the sake of a surprise ending.

However one might feel about its ending, Skin Deep well deserved the praise lavished on it at the time of its publication. Most enduring is the novel’s juxtaposition of New Guinean and English cultures, the former deeply embedded in ritual and taboo and the latter, by contrast, typified by a random and apparently meaningless (from the tribe’s point of view) frenzy of activity. In this way, the novel functions as a powerful critique of modern urban society, though it does so without idealizing the New Guineans' way of life.

Sleep and His Brother

In Greek mythology the phrase “sleep and his brother” refers to Hypnos, the god of sleep and dreams, and Thanatos, the god of death. In Sleep and His Brother, the name of Hypnos is never explicitly mentioned, but he is clearly the symbolic deity who presides over the premises of the South London Sospice estate, now home to the McNair Foundation, which provides care for cathypnics, children afflicted by a rare sleeping sickness (cathypny). This purely fictitious disease, the result of a hormonal abnormality, lowers the body temperature of those afflicted and generally leads to an early death. The god of death appears here explicitly in the form of a Greek millionaire and developer, Athanasius Thanatos, who is one of the McNair Foundation’s financial backers but whose motives may be more sinister than they at first appear.

When the novel opens, Pibble has been forced into early retirement by his Scotland Yard superiors and is feeling at odds with himself and more than a little resentful that he has been deprived of an occupation. His involvement with the McNair Foundation initially has nothing to do with a criminal investigation; he is cast instead in the role of reluctant private consultant, called in by the foundation’s secretary. Pibble soon suspects that the foundation’s resident psychiatrist, Dr. Ram Silver, may be a fraud—a con artist masquerading as a doctor. He also comes to suspect that this seeming philanthropist is secretly conspiring to turn the Sospice mansion into an exclusive resort. Although no death occurs until the novel’s dramatic conclusion, Pibble is convinced that a murder has indeed occurred, but he lacks the kind of proof that would convince his former Scotland Yard colleagues.

In this novel, Dickinson might be said to be deliberately deconstructing the traditional police procedural in several ways. The suspected murderer, for example, is never publicly exposed, preventing the reader from gaining any traditional sense of closure. Moreover, when late in the novel Pibble’s former colleagues from the Yard are called in, they are presented in satirical fashion as brutal careerists, dealing out physical and verbal abuse to hapless bystanders.

Sleep and His Brother draws extensively on contemporary scientific research to create not only a fictitious and yet utterly convincing disease but also a strikingly unconventional setting in which the children afflicted with that disease emerge as sympathetic and engaging characters. These cathypnic children have subnormal intelligence but manage to communicate effectively with vocabularies of no more than three hundred words. Fat and cherubic in appearance, they inspire obsessive affection in everyone. They are also believed to have paranormal abilities, a theme that Dickinson explores at some length, drawing some interesting parallels between Pibble’s own intuitive investigative methods and the supposed telepathic powers of the children. In addition, the novel explores questions of medical ethics—especially those involving eugenics and euthanasia—that were in the 1970s (and still remain) issues of political and social concern but were rarely dealt with so seriously in crime fiction. In fact, the solution to this hypothetical murder turns on the willingness of one researcher to use the cathypnic children as sacrificial lambs in his quest for a Nobel Prize.

The Last House-Party

The party in The Last House-Party, one of Dickinson's non-Pibble mystery novels, is a gathering of the English social elite for a weekend of games, political intrigue, sumptuous dinners, and a glittering ball. The party takes place at the Snailwood mansion in 1937, amid portents of the coming war with Germany. At the climax of these events, an eight-year-old girl, the daughter of Lady Snailwood’s secretary, is sexually assaulted. Decades later, that little girl, Sally Dubigny, has become the caretaker of the Snailwood estate, but the identity of her assailant remains a mystery. The arrival one day of an old man offering to repair Snailwood’s famous tower clock, stopped since 1937, opens a window to the past and a possible solution to the mystery.

Although Dickinson has been justly praised for his Pibble novels, it is in his later, non-series works that his fictional powers attain their full maturity. In The Last House-Party, plot, characterization, theme, setting, and symbolism are all unified and consistently developed. Dickinson’s portrayal of the so-called Snailwood Gang, the aristocratic circle of which the beautiful Lady Zena Snailwood is the cold and calculating centerpiece, is completely convincing. With a sure ear for the dialogue of the period, Dickinson explores the conflicting political currents of the era as well as the underlying personal obsessions and perversions that often shape them.

What is most compelling in this novel, however, is the recognition that the country-house mystery that it re-creates was, in essence, a ritual tale of guilt and expiation, requiring a scapegoat and a sacrificial victim. Numerous critics of golden age fiction have noted that most of the crime novels of the period depict a world that is essentially static, its social hierarchies and customs depicted as eternal and unchanging. Although that placid order is momentarily shattered by murder, its social equilibrium is restored in the end by an unambiguous identification of the killer and by his or her expulsion, symbolically speaking, from the community. By contrast, while The Last-House Party re-creates the glittering surface of that lost world and alludes frequently to the sacrificial theme, it does not offer its readers the same ritual closure. The sacrificial victim is not murdered, but rather lives on, carrying the repressed memories of that childhood tragedy into the present. In Sally's efforts to find some satisfying closure, she fashions a narrative about past events, believing that she has correctly identified the identity of her assailant. However, that narrative proves to have been built on false supposition and wish fulfillment. In the end, Sally is shattered by the revelation of the assailant’s true identity, and so too is the reader’s confidence shaken when the assailant proves to have been not just the most unlikely suspect but also the most sympathetic. Such an assault on the reader’s confidence would have been antithetical to the aims of the golden age crime writer.

Bibliography

Binyon, T. J. Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. Oxford UP, 1989. Useful discussion of the police procedural in chapter 3, including a brief reflection on Dickinson’s place in the genre.

Dickinson, Peter. “Murder in the Manor.” The Armchair Detective, Spring 1991, pp. 132–44. Here Dickinson expounds, from the point of view of writer and reader, on the golden age crime novel as a literary and psychological artifact.

Grimes, William. “Peter Dickinson, Author, Dies at 88; Master Plotter Relished a Good Puzzle.” The New York Times, 17 Dec. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/arts/peter-dickinson-author-whose-unpredictable-plots-blurred-genres-dies-at-88.html. Accessed 3 Aug. 2017.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. Routledge, 2005. Includes useful chapters on the role of the police procedural in maintaining the social status quo and on the parallels between historical research and crime investigation; relevant for Dickinson’s series and non-series novels.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. 3rd ed., Mysterious Press, 1993. Symons’s analysis of the golden age country-house mystery is essential for grasping Dickinson’s later novels.

Woeller, Waltraud, and Bruce Cassiday. The Literature of Crime and Detection: An Illustrated History from Antiquity to the Present. 1984. Ungar, 1988. Features a chapter titled “The Psychological Thriller” that provides useful background for students of Dickinson’s non-series novels.