Posted on 04/16/2025 12:44:03 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Peter Lovesey, the crime novelist, who has died aged 88, was a pioneer of the period whodunnit, as the creator of the Victorian sleuth Sergeant Cribb.
Although there had been a few one-off historical mysteries before the advent of Lovesey in the 1970s (including Agatha Christie’s Death Comes as the End, set in Thebes in 2000 BC), he was generally regarded as the first author to set a successful detective series in the past.
Sergeant Cribb paved the way for other period detectives such as Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael, Lindsey Davis’s Falco and C J Sansom’s Shardlake. The sub-genre now flourishes to the extent that the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) awards an annual Historical Dagger for the best period mystery. Lovesey showed that it was possible to combine a well-plotted mystery with a pungent evocation of the past. The Cribb novels focused on various facets of late Victorian life: the music hall (Abracadaver), the underground bare-knuckle boxing circuit (The Detective Wore Silk Drawers), Irish nationalist terrorism (Invitation to a Dynamite Party), the boating craze sparked by Jerome K Jerome’s bestselling Three Men in a Boat (Swing, Swing Together).
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Rest In Peace, Peter.
What about Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes?
Sherlock Holmes was set in Doyle’s contemporary London.
the first author to set a successful detective series in the past .
The Sherlock Holmes stories were set during Arthur Conan Doyle's lifetime.
Wasn’t Sherlock Holmes a successful detective series?
Past or present, what does that matter? Isn’t that splitting hairs a bit?
Available on YouTube
John Dickson Carr was doing that decades earlier, though Carr didn't use a recurring detective character in his historical mysteries, so in that sense they weren't a series.
Yes. But not set in the past when written
Past or present, what does that matter? Isn’t that splitting hairs a bit?
Hint: It’s always the butler.
Why not?
A lot more research goes into the historical because you have to get certain details right. And some of those details can trip you up and get you lots of nasty letters from readers who will tell you that the detective could not have used his flashlight in the way you said because, while flashlights were around they only gave one flash of light that lasted for seconds. So his spending several minutes looking around with his flashlight was not possible.
You make enough of those kinds of mistakes and you will never write a published series.
Mystery works set in the past are a subgenre.
I like Stuart M Kaminsky’s Toby Peters detective series. Every one set in the 1940’s with a famous celebrity of the day, Errol Flynn, Mae West, etc
I like Dickerson Carr or his 3 other pen names
He’s one of my favorites. I really like his books. I get a kick out of Sheldon Minck and Mrs Plout
I have been watching the new Inspector Dalgliesh series. It’s pretty good and not as politically correct as some other Britcop shows. P.D. James gimmick was that Dalgliesh was not only a policeman but also a published poet. I wonder why that one’s not more widely used. Kojack, National Book Award winner. Magnum, M.F.A Writing Instructor. Mike Hammer, accomplished sonneteer.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.