Peter Lovesey

• Born: September 10, 1936
• Place of Birth: Whiton, Middlesex, England

TYPES OF PLOT: Historical; police procedural; psychological

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Sergeant Cribb, 1970-; Bertie, the Prince of Wales, 1988-; Peter Diamond, 1991-

Contribution

One of the attractions of Peter Lovesey’s work is the interesting sidelights the author offers into esoteric aspects of history. His background in the history of sports has served him well, but not content with the Victorian setting with which he made his name, he has widened his scope to explore other periods. Rather than trying to recapture the style of bygone eras, Lovesey writes from a modern perspective, thus achieving an interesting juxtaposition of different detective-fiction traditions. The consistently high quality of his historical research, brilliant plots, and the skill with which he tells stories, ranging in tone from serious to comic, put Lovesey in the top ranks of historical mystery writers.

Lovesey’s later novels, while set in more recent times, reveal the same skill in plotting, characterization, and subtle humor, whether the novels are set in a small corner of England or range around the globe. Although Lovesey’s plots sometimes center on modern technology, his sleuths’ commitment to using traditional methods while maintaining their own independence shows the connection between the past and the present, particularly in the mystery genre.

Lovesey’s numerous awards include the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger Awards in 1978 for Waxwork, 1995 for The Summons, and 1996 for Bloodhounds, and the Gold Dagger Award in 1983 for The False Inspector Dew; the Anthony Award in 1992 for The Last Detective, and Macavity Awards in 1997 for Bloodhounds and 2004 for The House Sitter. In 2000, the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain awarded him the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for his lifetime achievement in the field.

Biography

Peter Harmer Lovesey was born on September 10, 1936, in Whitton, Middlesex, England, the son of Richard Lear, a bank official, and Amy Strank Lovesey. He attended Hampton Grammar School and the University of Reading, receiving honors in English in 1958. He served as an education officer and flying officer in the Royal Air Force from 1958 to 1961, and he married Jacqueline Ruth Lewis in 1959. After teaching at Thurrock Technical College in Grays, Essex, for eight years, Lovesey became the head of the general education department at Hammersmith College for Further Education in London until 1975. Lovesey has a daughter and a son, Philip, who as Phil Lovesey, has become a crime novelist in his own right.

In the article “Magician, Actor, Runner—Writer,” Lovesey traces the influences of his childhood ambitions on his writing career. By his own account, he was one of the first joggers, accompanying himself with his radio commentary as he trained on dark suburban streets. When he realized he was not cut out to be a runner, he became a fan of those who were and, utilizing his academic skills, turned to research on the history of running. A photograph in a sports magazine of a nineteenth-century North American Indian, Deerfoot, spurred Lovesey’s interest in the Victorian period. Researching accounts of running events of the previous century in a newspaper museum, he found stories full of “character, color, and eccentricity,” which he turned into articles for track and field magazines. After five years of writing, earning nothing but the title of “world’s foremost authority on the history of athletics,” Lovesey published a book on long-distance runners, The Kings of Distance: A Study of Five Great Runners (1968).

For his entry to the Panther-Macmillan First Crime Novel Competition, Lovesey created a mystery involving a nineteenth-century running event known as wobbles. The result was his first mystery novel, Wobble to Death (1970), which won the competition. Since then, he has delved into other aspects of Victorian life for the Sergeant Cribb series and branched out into other historical periods. In 1975, he became a full-time writer. With his wife, Jackie, who holds a degree in psychology and was more of a mystery fan than he, Lovesey adapted some of the Cribb novels and wrote six new ones for the television series based on the Cribb novels. Jackie, being more familiar with the genre, helped Lovesey steer clear of hackneyed situations in his novels.

Analysis

Unusual among mystery writers, Peter Lovesey started his career in the genre not because he loved reading mysteries but because he loved sports, long-distance running in particular. His prizewinning debut, Wobble to Death, is set in the Agricultural Hall in Islington in 1879, at one of the running events known as wobbles, in which contestants try to run the greatest possible distance in six days. The hardships of the runners, the filth and stench pervading the building rented for the event, the tricks that athletes and trainers used to gain an extra winning edge, and the varied and sometimes mysterious reasons that a sport becomes so obsessively important to its contestants are all evoked in vivid detail. The reader learns about this nineteenth-century sporting event along with Sergeant Cribb and his assistant Thackeray, who are called to the scene when one of the runners favored to win is murdered.

This winning combination of the historical setting, the sociology and psychology of sports, and a modern police procedural story led to a series of Cribb adventures highlighting other aspects of Victorian life: bare-knuckle prizefighting in The Detective Wore Silk Drawers (1971), hammer-throwing and the music-hall stage in Abracadaver (1972), seaside resorts in Mad Hatter’s Holiday: A Novel of Murder in Victorian Brighton (1973), and Irish terrorism in Invitation to a Dynamite Party (1974). A Case of Spirits (1975) explores the dynamics of Victorian family life, the emancipated new woman, and the craze for spiritual phenomena.

Lovesey’s other novels branch out from the Cribb series. They may be set in a different historical period, such as the Hollywood of Mack Sennett in Keystone (1983) or a transatlantic ocean liner in the 1920s in The False Inspector Dew (1982). Rough Cider (1987), set in the 1960s, describes the consequences of an incident during World War II. In Bertie and the Tinman (1988), however, Lovesey returns to the Victorian sporting scene.

Mystery novels set in the past, whether in Victorian times as in the works of Lovesey, , or Nicholas Meyer, or centuries ago as in the works of or Robert van Gulik, automatically have a charm of their own. As a genre, mystery fiction has traditionally been considered a form of escapist literature, and historical mysteries provide an escape even further removed from the realities of modern life. The Victorian setting of Lovesey’s Cribb series, for example, evokes not only the stereotypes of a slower, more leisurely era but also the tradition of those mystery-fiction giants, Sherlock Holmes and Watson. The unequal intellectual contest between ’s famous duo is re-created in Lovesey’s Sergeant Cribb and Edward Thackeray; the latter wishes, as he plods through the tedious tasks assigned him, to surprise his superior just once with some vital discovery, but like Watson, he cannot.

Lovesey has explained that Victorian society was a rich source of motivations for crime. The twentieth century, with its “social welfare and easier divorce and psychiatric care, has removed many of the bad old reasons for murder.” By contrast, the Victorian need for respectability provides more motives for murder: “The need to achieve security by inheritance, or life insurance, or marriage; the risk of losing it when scandal threatened; the equating of sex with sin; the stigma of insanity; the things that went unsaid.”

A historical setting, Lovesey notes, must conform to a framework of historical fact, which cannot be changed and which thus assures a measure of certainty and control. In Invitation to a Dynamite Party, for example, which the author describes as a Victorian James Bond book, the reader knows that the plot to assassinate the Prince of Wales cannot succeed. Although some elements of plot are thus deprived of suspense, there is still the whimsical pleasure of recognizing real historical characters or events juxtaposed to the fictional: Sergeant Cribb will occasionally mention Charlie Peace, an infamous Victorian murderer, or the equally infamous Jack the Ripper; the pioneers of Hollywood—Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand, and Fatty Arbuckle—appear in Keystone; and The False Inspector Dew features a brief description of the sinking of the Lusitania. In Bertie and the Tinman, the Prince of Wales is the detective figure, with cameo appearances from his mother, Queen Victoria.

As interesting as their backgrounds are, Lovesey’s novels do not appeal merely because of their historical detail; rather, they illustrate his own view of such historical novels: “All we ask of the historical mystery is that it tells a story consistent with known facts and that those facts arise naturally from the plot. If we want a history lecture, we can go to college.” Because of their historical setting and their range of tone, it would be misleading to characterize the Sergeant Cribb novels as typical police procedurals. Some elements, however, as described by George Dove and Earl Bargainnier in their introduction to Cops and Constables: American and British Fictional Policemen (1986), are indeed typical. Dove and Bargainnier place the police story within the classic category of mystery fiction, which develops step by step, and within the hard-boiled school, with its physical and pragmatic approach. This category of fictional police detectives is, in turn, divided into two—the older school, with its emphasis on “cop sense,” relying on intelligence, common sense, and a broad understanding of human nature, and the more recent school, drawing on technological advances in police work such as forensic science, the police laboratory, and computers.

Lovesey’s historical detective figures are of necessity in the older school. Sergeant Cribb has been with the Criminal Investigation Department since its inception, and although a few scientific advances have been made in the field of crime detection, he must rely on his experience and understanding of human nature to solve cases. As is typical of police detectives, who cannot exercise a private code of ethics or choose their cases as the private investigators of hard-boiled detective fiction can, Cribb has to work on cases within the limitations imposed by police hierarchy and politics. In Waxwork (1978), for example, he glumly reflects that after seventeen years, his chances for a promotion are practically nil because he tends to be so outspoken. Aware of this bitter situation, his superior, Inspector Jowett, who has advanced primarily through his skill with paperwork and rigorous adherence to the police code, forces him to take a politically dangerous assignment. Cribb fully realizes, however, that the assignment cannot advance his career in any way because no matter what part he plays in the case, Jowett will appropriate all the credit.

The hard-boiled tradition, however, does not dominate all of Lovesey’s novels. A more lighthearted twentieth-century perspective prevails in other novels. Swing, Swing Together (1976) and The False Inspector Dew, for example, have a delightfully wry postmodernist self-referential quality. The False Inspector Dew, as indicated in the title, plays on the case of the real Inspector Dew, who captured the infamous Dr. Crippen and his lover. Such extended jokes blended into classic puzzle plots are surely hard to find in college history lectures. Luckily for anyone who does not mind accumulating bits of history as long as the promise of a good murder story is there, Lovesey offers fascinating glimpses of life in other eras with skill, imagination, thoughtfulness, and humor.

These same qualities imbue Lovesey’s later detective fiction, including the psychological mysteries Rough Cider, On the Edge (1989), and The Reaper (2001), and particularly his series about Peter Diamond, head of the Murder Squad for the Avon and Somerset police force until he resigns in a dispute with his superior. Diamond later returns under his own terms, thus establishing his independence from traditional bureaucracy and authority. Diamond distrusts modern police technology and cannot operate a computer, but he will use the results of technology if someone else obtains them for him. He relies on his own common sense and ability to talk to people to achieve his results, which are successful enough that his gruff manner and uncontrolled tongue are often—if not always—excused by superiors and coworkers. However, his irascibility causes an assistant he admires, Julie Hargreaves, to ask for a transfer to headquarters, even though she otherwise likes and admires him. Diamond also suffers a deep personal loss during the series. Lovesey’s presentation of Diamond is complex enough that admiration for him is usually tempered by regret over his lack of forethought. Though these novels are set in the present, Lovesey’s love of the past has not disappeared: Bath, we are reminded in several novels, was the home, at various times, of Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Overall, this series shows Lovesey’s mastery in combining modern themes and subjects with the traditional genre virtues of skillful plotting and interesting characterization.

Swing, Swing Together

Drawing on the enormous popularity of ’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of a Dog), published in 1889, Lovesey anchors Swing, Swing Together in Jerome’s story of a trip on the Thames River. Harriet Shaw, a romantic seventeen-year-old, inadvertently witnesses a murder involving three men and a dog in a boat. Unaware that there is a vogue for re-creating the events of the book among the populace, Cribb, Thackeray, and a young village police officer, all traveling incognito, take Harriet along to track the movements of the men Harriet saw. They are disconcerted to find that numerous parties of three in boats are following the same trail and that no one is inclined to take their search seriously.

Waxwork

An excellent example of Lovesey’s skill in integrating historical ambiance and detail with a good story is Waxwork, in which Cribb is asked to conduct an independent investigation to clear up some inconsistencies in the confession of a condemned murderer, Miriam Cromer. The story is woven from three separate threads, one following Cribb as he retraces the trail of evidence, one tracing the process of Miriam’s incarceration, and a third following James Barry, a real Victorian hangman, as he negotiates with Madame Tussaud for the sale of Miriam’s clothing after he executes her. Memorable scenes of a Victorian women’s jail and the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s, a testimony to the public’s fascination with criminals, emerge naturally from the plot. The three storylines are intertwined when Barry, seeking to present his wife with a picture of himself done by Miriam’s husband, a famous photographer, innocently precipitates the hasty actions that reveal the true murderer to Cribb.

Waxwork is one of the most hard-boiled of the Cribb police procedurals in its dark tone, its depiction of inept police officers, its intimation of high-level political manipulation, its cynical view of humanity, and its portrayal of Cribb as a lone and lonely figure in search of the truth regardless of where it leads him. Significantly, it is one Cribb novel in which Thackeray does not appear. Indeed, Lovesey has described Cribb as a character who manifests the three qualities that , the American writer of hard-boiled mysteries, listed as typical of a contemporary American detective hero: “an impatience with special privilege, a sense of interdependence among men and a certain modesty.”

The Summons

The Summons (1995) establishes Bath as the geographical center of the Peter Diamond series, as Diamond uses an escaped convict’s threat to leverage a return to the police force. Diamond’s skill in eliciting and interpreting information is highlighted, as is his reluctance to use deadly force in apprehending a suspect. Above all, Diamond’s integrity is recognized, particularly by the convict, who asks for Diamond because he is “straight.” Lovesey’s skill at plotting is also exhibited in the explanation for the chief clue in the original crime, roses stuffed in the mouth of the victim. Diamond’s success represents the triumph of the older, more traditional policing methods.

Diamond Dust

Lovesey here forces his readers out of their comfort zone as Peter Diamond investigates (against orders, of course) the death of his wife, Stephanie, who in previous novels had proved to be a thoroughly likable yet human character. Diamond’s pain is depicted realistically and unsentimentally, and his search is characteristically blunt and thorough. The explanation of the killer’s motive is believable and psychologically sound, as Lovesey plays fair with the clues and evidence. If Lovesey has a weakness, it is in the coziness of some of his plots, particularly in the historical novels. Diamond Dust shows that the charge no longer applies and that the world of crime can enter the circle of the detective.

Further Works

Lovesey continued the Peter Diamond series for several decades. The collection is comprised of more than twenty novels, including Skeleton Hill (2009), Cop to Corpse (2012), The Stone Wife (2014), Beau Death (2017), The Finisher (2020), and Showstopper (2022). For his work on these novels and his contributions to crime novels, Lovesey was honored in 2016 with a novel published by the UK's Detection Club entitled Motives for Murder. In 2019, the Anthony Boucher Memorial World Mystery Convention also honored the author.

Principal Series Characters:

• Sergeant Cribb, in his forties at his first appearance, is a tall, lean man with full side whiskers who dresses well and relishes impersonations on the job. His keen sense of morality is tempered with irony, and his delight in the new and unusual is offset by the bitterness of having worked seventeen years without a promotion. He is married, but his wife, Millie, appears only infrequently.
• Edward Thackeray, a burly constable, is proud of his full gray beard. He is a more conventional man than his superior and is uneasy in strange situations. Unable to pass official examinations, he serves Cribb as a sounding board and performs most of the legwork on their cases, with little hope of promotion.
• Inspector Jowett, once Cribb’s fellow sergeant, is now his superior and an obstacle to his promotion. An astute politician and a class snob, Jowett has risen rapidly in the ranks because of his ability to present himself well in written reports of cases without giving credit to those who actually did the work.
• Bertie, the Prince of Wales is largely based on the public perception of the eldest son of Queen Victoria, who later became King Edward VII. He is a large, gourmandizing womanizer who enjoys the sports of the upper classes and thinks he can use his deductive skills to solve crimes.
• Peter Diamond, a large, imposing man whose bald spot is hidden by his omnipresent Trilby hat, is in his late forties at the beginning of the series. A detective superintendent living in Bath, England, Diamond is a traditional police detective who distrusts technology and bureaucracy, relying on interviewing skills and deductive reasoning to solve his cases.

Bibliography

Bedell, Jeanne F. “Peter Lovesey’s Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray.” In Cops and Constables: American and British Fictional Policemen, edited by Earl F. Bargainnier and George N. Dove, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986.

"Books." Peter Lovesey, peterlovesey.com/books. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Carr, John C. The Craft of Crime: Conversations with Crime Writers. Houghton Mifflin, 1983.

Cooper-Clark, Diana. “An Interview with Peter Lovesey.” In The Armchair Detective, vol. 14, Summer 1981, pp. 210-17.

Hanson, Gilliam Mary. City and Shore: The Function of Setting in British Mystery. Mcfarland, 2004.

Huang, Jim, and Austin Lugar, editors. Mystery Muses: One Hundred Classics That Inspire Today’s Mystery Writers. Crum Creek Press, 2006.

Hurt, James. “How Unlike the Home Life of Our Own Dear Queen: The Detective Fiction of Peter Lovesey.” In Art in Crime Writing: Essays on Detective Fiction, edited by Bernard Benstock, St. Martin’s Press, 1983.

Lovesey, Peter. “Magician, Actor, Runner—Writer.” Writer, vol. 101, Jan. 1988, p. 11.

Lovesey, Peter. “An Up-to-Date Victorian.” Interview by Leonard Picker. Publishers Weekly, vol. 252, no. 13, Mar. 2005, p. 60.

Silet, Charles L. P. Talking Murder: Interviews with Twenty Mystery Writers. W. W. Norton, 1999.