Crime Fiction

I've never had much to do with crime fact (thankfully the police haven't knocked on my door many times!) but crime fiction - that's a whole different thing. 

Perhaps Dixon of Dock Green would be the earliest introduction, way back in the 60's it was on TV every Saturday evening, then Z cars was the spin-off. Followed by Softly Softly.

 My first crime reading would have been Josephine Tey and Agatha Christie in the early 1970's just before I left school and started work as a library assistant - which opened up a whole new world of reading.

I didn't read much crime through the rest of the 70's as I was busy with Catherine Cookson, family sagas and other historical fiction but got back into crime fiction in the 80's, whenever I had time, between having 3 children and moving 3 times.

 

Many of the authors  read back then have long since passed away. I've looked through my book-of-books-read to pick out a few names - long forgotten.

 

Marion Babson was one of the first crime authors I read, writing from the late 70's, although her cat mystery stories were a genre I never got into.

John Wainwright - He wrote 80 crime stories between 1965 and 1992.

David Williams wrote two series from the mid 70's to 2003

Pauline Bell produced 14 books between 1990 and 2009. I've read most of them

Janie Bolitho wrote between 1993 and her death from breast cancer at just 52 years old in 2002

Robert Barnard was a very prolific author of crime fiction between 1978 - 2010 

John Buxton Hilton also writing  as John Greenwood through the 1970s and 80's wrote nearly 30 books before he died in 1986

Not forgetting authors such as Ellis Peters(AKA Edith Pargeter) whose brilliant Cadfael series began in 1977 and ended with her death in 1995 and   Edward Marston who has written an amazing 76 books since 1988 and is still going.

Then a few years ago someone realised that there were authors who'd written in the 1940's and 50's but, unlike Christie, had fallen out of favour and never been republished. The British Library re-published their first Crime Classic, Mystery in White in 2014 and the 100th will appear in the new year. Some of these authors definitely deserve a new audience (E.C.Lorac) others I've tried and failed with.

Just a couple of years later Agora Books started reprinting many of the George Bellairs Inspector Littlejohn  books written originally between 1942 and 1980. There are several dozen of these although many haven't been re-published yet.

More recently we  have brilliant authors like C.J.Sansom, Rory Clements, Anne Perry, Ellie Griffiths, Nicola Upson, Jacqueline Winspear and of course Ann Cleeves who wrote her first book in 1986 but really came to the fore when the Vera and Shetland series were made for TV.

I finished the new Ann Cleeves -  A Heron's Cry, the second in her North Devon series the other day and it was really good to watch the TV series of the first book just a few days before reading the second,  reminding me of  the previous story line because it's mentioned several times in the second book. 

 There is one author I've missed out reading over the last umpteen years.......P.D. James. I don't know why and don't even know if I ever tried any but with a new series of Dalgieish  being shown on TV there will be no need to try again.

 

 It doesn't look like I'll run out of crime fiction to read anytime soon with dozens of old books being re-published each year and new authors like Richard Osman leaping into crime writing and I have these two old series, collected years ago that I've not even started reading yet.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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