W.J. Burley
Burley was born in Falmouth, Cornwall. Before he began writing, he was employed in senior management with various gas companies, before giving it up after the Second World War when he obtained a scholarship to study zoology at Balliol College, Oxford. After obtaining an honours degree he became a teacher. Appointed head of biology, first at Richmond & East Sheen County Grammar School in 1953, then at Newquay Grammar School in 1955, he was well established as a writer by the time he retired at the age of 60 in 1974. He died at his home in Holywell, Cornwall, on 15 August 2002.
John Burley had his first novel published when he was in his early fifties. His second published novel, two years later, saw the appearance of Superintendent Charles Wy
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Jack Sheffield
Jack Sheffield (born Jack Linley, 1945) is a British author who wrote a series of books of fiction about the headmaster of a village school in a fictional Yorkshire village. The stories are set from the late 1970s to the early 1980s and attempt to portray life in Yorkshire as it was at that time.
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He was trained as a teacher at St John's College, York and later became head teacher of two schools in North Yorkshire and then senior lecturer in primary education at Bretton Hall.
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Jeffrey Archer
Jeffrey is published in 114 countries and more than 47 languages, with more than 750,000 5* reviews with international sales passing 275 million copies.
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He is the only author ever to have been a number one bestseller in fiction (nineteen times), short stories (four times) and non-fiction (The Prison Diaries).
Jeffrey has been married for 53 years to Dame Mary Archer DBE. They have two sons, William and James, three grandsons and two granddaughters, and divide their time between homes in London, Cambridge and Mallorca. -
Lee Child
Lee Child was born October 29th, 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation director during British TV's "golden age." During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. But he was fired in 1995 at the age of 40 as a result of corporate restructuring. Always a voracious reader, he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis and bou
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Ruth Rendell
A.K.A. Barbara Vine
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Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE, who also wrote under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, was an acclaimed English crime writer, known for her many psychological thrillers and murder mysteries and above all for Inspector Wexford. -
Margery Allingham
Aka Maxwell March.
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Margery Louise Allingham was born in Ealing, London in 1904 to a family of writers. Her father, Herbert John Allingham, was editor of The Christian Globe and The New London Journal, while her mother wrote stories for women's magazines as Emmie Allingham. Margery's aunt, Maud Hughes, also ran a magazine. Margery earned her first fee at the age of eight, for a story printed in her aunt's magazine.
Soon after Margery's birth, the family left London for Essex. She returned to London in 1920 to attend the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster), and met her future husband, Philip Youngman Carter. They married in 1928. He was her collaborator and designed the cover jackets for many of her books.
Margery's bre -
Colin Dexter
Norman Colin Dexter was an English crime writer, known for his Inspector Morse novels.
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He started writing mysteries in 1972 during a family holiday: "We were in a little guest house halfway between Caernarfon and Pwllheli. It was a Saturday and it was raining - it's not unknown for it to rain in North Wales. The children were moaning ... I was sitting at the kitchen table with nothing else to do, and I wrote the first few paragraphs of a potential detective novel." Last Bus to Woodstock was published in 1975 and introduced the world to the character of Inspector Morse, the irascible detective whose penchants for cryptic crosswords, English literature, cask ale and Wagner reflect Dexter's own enthusiasms. Dexter's plots are notable for his us -
Josephine Tey
Josephine Tey was a pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh. Josephine was her mother's first name and Tey the surname of an English Grandmother. As Josephine Tey, she wrote six mystery novels featuring Scotland Yard's Inspector Alan Grant.
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The first of these, The Man in the Queue (1929) was published under the pseudonym of Gordon Daviot , whose name also appears on the title page of another of her 1929 novels, Kif; An Unvarnished History. She also used the Daviot by-line for a biography of the 17th century cavalry leader John Graham, which was entitled Claverhouse (1937).
Mackintosh also wrote plays (both one act and full length), some of which were produced during her lifetime, under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot. The district of Daviot, near h -
Ngaio Marsh
Dame Ngaio Marsh, born Edith Ngaio Marsh, was a New Zealand crime writer and theatre director. There is some uncertainty over her birth date as her father neglected to register her birth until 1900, but she was born in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand.
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Of all the "Great Ladies" of the English mystery's golden age, including Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh alone survived to publish in the 1980s. Over a fifty-year span, from 1932 to 1982, Marsh wrote thirty-two classic English detective novels, which gained international acclaim. She did not always see herself as a writer, but first planned a career as a painter.
Marsh's first novel, A MAN LAY DEAD (1934), which she wrote in London in 1931-32, introdu -
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Peter James
Peter James is a global bestselling author, best known for writing crime and thriller novels, and the creator of the much-loved Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. With a total of 16 Sunday Times No. 1s under his belt, he has achieved global book sales of over 20 million copies to date and has been translated into 37 languages.
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Synonymous with plot-twisting page-turners, Peter has garnered an army of loyal fans throughout his storytelling career – which also included stints writing for TV and producing films. He has won over 40 awards for his work, including the WHSmith Best Crime Author of All Time Award, Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger and a BAFTA nomination for The Merchant of Venice starring Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons for which -
R.D. Wingfield
Rodney David Wingfield was a prolific writer of radio crime plays and comedy scripts, some for the late Kenneth Williams, star of the Carry On films. His crime novels featuring DI Jack Frost have been successfully adapted for television as A Touch of Frost starring David Jason. Wingfield was a modest man, shunning the London publicity scene in favour of a quite life in Basildon, Essex, with his wife of 52 years (died 2004) and only son.
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Jack Sheffield
Jack Sheffield (born Jack Linley, 1945) is a British author who wrote a series of books of fiction about the headmaster of a village school in a fictional Yorkshire village. The stories are set from the late 1970s to the early 1980s and attempt to portray life in Yorkshire as it was at that time.
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He was trained as a teacher at St John's College, York and later became head teacher of two schools in North Yorkshire and then senior lecturer in primary education at Bretton Hall.
He took up writing after retirement, and his first novel "Teacher, Teacher!" sold 100,000 copies -
J.R. Ellis
During a long career teaching English, I wrote plays for children and occasional ghost stories. I have always been fascinated by the paranormal and by mysteries, conspiracy theories and unexplained crimes.
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My love of my native county is deep and the settings of my Yorkshire Murder Mysteries within Yorkshire's varied landscapes are important. I have made a study of the sub-genre of the Locked Room Mystery during the height of its popularity between 1930 - 1960 in the stories of writers such as John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson and Ellery Queen. I was an avid watcher of BBC's "Jonathan Creek" in its heyday. I believe the element of puzzle is essential to crime fiction and my novels contain a double mystery: the standard "who dunnit?" but also -
John Bude
John Bude was a pseudonym used by Ernest Carpenter Elmore who was a British born writer.
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He was born in 1901 and, as a boarder, he attended Mill Hill School, leaving in 1919 and moving on to Cheltenham where he attended a secretarial college and where he learned to type. After that he spent several years as games master at St Christopher School in Letchworth where he also led the school's dramatic activities.
This keen interest in the theatre led him to join the Lena Ashwell Players as stage manager and he took their productions around the country. He also acted in plays produced at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead, where he lived for a time. He honed his writing skills, whenever he had a moment to spare, in the various dressing rooms that -
Clare Mackintosh
Welcome to my Goodreads profile! Whether you're new to my work, or a hard-core fan, it's lovely to see you here. My latest book is OTHER PEOPLE'S HOUSES, the third book in my DC Ffion Morgan series. Like THE LAST PARTY and A GAME OF LIES, this is designed to be read as a standalone, but if you've followed Ffion and Leo from the beginning, I think you'll love seeing where OTHER PEOPLE'S HOUSES takes them.
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If this is the first time we're meeting, welcome! In addition to the books above, I'm the author of I LET YOU GO, I SEE YOU, LET ME LIE and HOSTAGE - page-turning thrillers that have sold more than three million copies across 40 countries, and hit bestseller lists including The Sunday Times and The New York Times. I also wrote the emotional -
P.D. James
P. D. James, byname of Phyllis Dorothy James White, Baroness James of Holland Park, (born August 3, 1920, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England—died November 27, 2014, Oxford), British mystery novelist best known for her fictional detective Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard.
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The daughter of a middle-grade civil servant, James grew up in the university town of Cambridge. Her formal education, however, ended at age 16 because of lack of funds, and she was thereafter self-educated. In 1941 she married Ernest C.B. White, a medical student and future physician, who returned home from wartime service mentally deranged and spent much of the rest of his life in psychiatric hospitals. To support her family (which included two children), she took work in hospita -
J.M. Dalgliesh
Jason Dalgliesh was born on the south coast of England and grew up in Hampshire, UK. He has worked in the power transmission industry, the retail sector, call centres and as a night-owl in a bakery. His greatest challenge of all is ongoing, as a stay at home parent.
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He is presently writing the Dark Yorkshire crime-series, featuring DI Nathaniel Caslin.
The novels are set in Yorkshire, England. The medieval City of York is Caslin's home town and the plot lines take in some of the UK's most rugged and beautiful landscapes, from the windswept North Sea coastline and across the stunning North York Moors.
Penned in the style of the Crime Noir genre, Caslin is a deep character, as flawed as he is brilliant, battling his own demons as much as those h