Peter Lovesey, a Master of British Whodunits, Is Dead at 88

New York Times

28-04-2025

Peter Lovesey was working as a college lecturer in 1968 when he answered an ad in The Times of London offering a thousand pounds for the best crime novel written by a novice. The prize was more than his annual salary.
He had already written a book about the history of distance runners, and his wife, Jacqueline, known as Jax, thought there might be something to mine there. Thus prodded, he remembered the peculiar and grueling Victorian contests known as 'go-as-you-please,' in which participants ran or walked around the same track, an eighth of a mile, for six days — those who finished would have clocked 600 miles — eating and catnapping when they could, and boosting their performance with stimulants like champagne, coca leaves and strychnine, a pick-me-up in small doses but, of course, a lethal poison in large quantities.
Bingo. He had his subject.
Yet as his wife pointed out, 'The Go-as-You-Please Murders' didn't exactly captivate as a title. Then Mr. Lovesey recalled that the newspapers of the era called the races 'wobbles.'
'There's your title,' she told him: ''Wobble to Death.''
The book, with its irresistible title, won the prize, and it was published to critical and popular acclaim in 1970. Mr. Lovesey would go on to write more than 40 mysteries, a quarter of them Victorian-era police procedurals.
Over his half-century career, he won more mystery awards than there is space to list and proved to be a master practitioner of brainy whodunits in the classic English tradition, presiding over the genre's second golden age, along with peers like P.D. James and Ruth Rendell.
Mr. Lovesey died on April 10 at his home in Shrewsbury, in western England. He was 88. His son, Phil, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
'Wobble to Death' introduced the sharp and unflappable Sergeant Cribb and his stolid sidekick, Constable Thackeray. When the publisher handed Mr. Lovesey his winnings, he asked what the next book would be. Mr. Lovesey, stunned, hopped to it, and he was soon churning out one witty puzzler featuring Cribb and Thackeray every year.
'The Detective Wore Silk Drawers' (1971) involved bare-knuckle boxing, which was illegal in late-19th-century London. 'Abracadaver' (1972) was set in a music hall. In subsequent books, the pair investigated a series of bombings by Irish nationalists, a seaside murder and another murder that began with a false confession.
By 1975, the year 'A Case of Spirits,' Mr. Lovesey's sixth book, was published — it involved a séance and an art theft — he had quit his day job. When, in 1979, the books were adapted by British television as a series starring Alan Dobie as Sergeant Cribb, with many of the screenplays written by Mr. Lovesey and his wife, he decided he'd had enough.
'I was delighted by the casting of Alan Dobie as my detective, Sergeant Cribb, but in a strange way he inhabited the character so powerfully that when I came to think about further books all I could see was Alan's face,' he told an interviewer. 'I'd lost my original character somewhere in the process. Moreover, I used up my stock of settings to write the second series with Jax's help. The cupboard was bare.'
Enter the hapless, hedonistic and amiable Prince Albert, the future King Edward VII and Mr. Lovesey's next hero. As depicted by Mr. Lovesey, he was an accidental amateur detective who blundered and blustered his way through three cases — and three popular books. Newgate Callendar, in his New York Times review of the first one, 'Bertie and the Tinman' (1988), which begins with the apparent suicide of Britain's most popular jockey, called it a 'delightful romp' with 'a strong dash of P.G. Wodehouse.'
A few years later, Mr. Lovesey turned to the present with 'The Last Detective' (1991), in which a short-tempered, overweight and technology-averse superintendent named Peter Diamond investigates the murder of a former soap star in the city of Bath. There are historical touches — a side plot involves letters from Jane Austen — but mostly it's about Diamond's struggle with modernity, and his own brutish failings.
'I knew little about police procedure or forensic science,' Mr. Lovesey said last year. 'To hide my ignorance, I made Peter Diamond the last of a vanishing generation of Scotland Yard men who beat up suspects, disregarded the rules and despised the men in white coats. He came to genteel Bath, created mayhem and solved a difficult crime in his rough-and-ready way.'
Twenty-one Peter Diamond mysteries followed, throughout which the irascible detective mellowed slightly while Mr. Lovesey entangled him in ever more inventive plots. The last, 'Against the Grain,' which involved a murder in a grain silo and Diamond's retirement, was published last year.
Except for the grumpy part, Mr. Lovesey's son said, Superintendent Diamond was a stand-in for his creator, who was bitterly opposed to technology. Mr. Lovesey wrote in longhand for decades before briefly and reluctantly switching to an electric 'golf ball' Olivetti typewriter and then, finally, a word processor, which threw him entirely. During the pandemic, his son said, he mistakenly downloaded Zoom 25 times.
Peter Harmer Lovesey was born on Sept. 10, 1936, in Whitton, Middlesex, now a suburb of London. He was one of three sons of Amy (Strank) Lovesey and Richard Lovesey, a bank clerk.
Peter's life was upended in 1944, when his semidetached house was bombed by the Germans while he was at school. His younger brothers, who were at home, survived; all the members of the family who lived in the other half of the house were killed. For a time, the Loveseys were evacuated to a farm in southwest England.
Peter graduated from the University of Reading in Essex, where he studied art, but switched to English after he met and fell in love with Jacqueline Lewis. They married in 1959.
Mr. Lovesey did his national service with the Royal Air Force, which involved duties as, he said, 'a pilot officer who piloted nothing and a flying officer who didn't fly.' He then taught at various colleges and wrote his first book, 'The Kings of Distance' (1968), about five real-life distance runners.
During the Cribb-to-Bertie period, Mr. Lovesey wrote a few contemporary novels, some under the pseudonym Peter Lear, including 'Goldengirl' (1977), about the exploitation of an Olympic track star, which was made into a 1979 film starring Susan Anton. 'The False Inspector Dew' (1982), set on the ocean liner Mauritania, imagines an alternate fate for Hawley Harvey Crippen, whose murder of his wife was a cause célèbre in 1910.
'On the Edge' (1989), written under his own name, was about two former members of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force during World War II who were aircraft 'plotters' — or air traffic controllers, crucial during the Battle of Britain — but were bored to tears once the war was over and hatched a plan to murder each other's repulsive husbands. Marilyn Stasio of The Times praised the book's 'joie de mort.'
In addition to his son, Mr. Lovesey is survived by his wife; a daughter, Kathy Hill; and five grandchildren.
Mr. Lovesey was well known not just for his writing but for weaving excerpts from his fan mail into his speeches. He was particularly fond of this correspondence from a female reader:
'I have not written to thank you because I assumed you died many years ago,' she wrote. 'My husband says he thinks you may still be alive. We had quite an argument about it last night. I suppose it does not really matter, but we would be most grateful to have the question cleared up.'