Peter Lovesey, Novelist Who Pioneered the Historical Whodunnit With His Victorian Detective Cribb

Yahoo! News ^ | 4/11

[No name given]

Rest In Peace, Peter.

[Jim W N]

the first author to set a successful detective series

What about Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes?

[Fai Mao]

Sherlock Holmes was set in Doyle’s contemporary London.

[Gil4]

the first author to set a successful detective series
What about Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes?

the first author to set a successful detective series in the past .

The Sherlock Holmes stories were set during Arthur Conan Doyle's lifetime.

[Jim W N]

Wasn’t Sherlock Holmes a successful detective series?

[Jim W N]

Past or present, what does that matter? Isn’t that splitting hairs a bit?

[OldHarbor]

Granada Tv made 13 episodes of Cribb (Sgt Cribb in North America )

Available on YouTube

[HartleyMBaldwin]

Lovesey showed that it was possible to combine a well-plotted mystery with a pungent evocation of the past.

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.

[Fai Mao]

Yes. But not set in the past when written

[Jim W N]

Past or present, what does that matter? Isn’t that splitting hairs a bit?

[Larry Lucido]

Hint: It’s always the butler.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

No.

[Jim W N]

Why not?

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Because writing a historical novel and writing a contemporary is two different things.

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.

[Fai Mao]

Mystery works set in the past are a subgenre.

[packrat35]

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

[airedale]

I like Dickerson Carr or his 3 other pen names

[airedale]

He’s one of my favorites. I really like his books. I get a kick out of Sheldon Minck and Mrs Plout

[x]

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.