I’ve never read any of Peter Lovesey’s books, but I was nonetheless saddened to read of his death on April 10. Shelf Awareness ran a short piece on his career and I learned a whole lot of things about this prolific writer whose books I clearly remember shelving way back when I was a library page.
Did you know that Lovesey is credited as the first to successfully set a detective series in the past? His series featuring the Victorian detective Sergeant Cribb explored gritty crime in settings such as music halls and underground boxing rings. Cribb’s adventures were made into a popular television series in the late 1970s, which I now must try and track down (hoping I might find an old DVD in a library somewhere!)
Lovesey went on to write a popular contemporary series featuring hard-as-nails detective Peter Diamond. This is the series I am now reading! There are dozens of Diamond stories out there, and I am determined to read each one.
Lovesey concluded the Diamond series with his last publication, Against the Grain, in 2024.
Lovesey concludes his long-running series featuring Bath detective Peter Damond with a bang, delivering an ingenious fair-play whodunit set in the small English village of Baskerville as the annual harvest festival approaches . . . Lovesey derives genuine emotion from Diamond’s potential retirement, and his golden age-style plotting is as tight as ever. This sends the series out on a high note. Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Lovesey was also apparently a stand-up human being, acknowledged by friends and colleagues as someone who led a really good life. He won multiple awards for his work, and I suspect inspired many crime fiction writers of the last few decades.
Now that I’m retired from work as a library director, I am making much more time to read and catching up with a lot of authors I’ve neglected over the years. Lovesey is one of them.
If you want to know more about Peter Lovesey, read the Shelf Awareness article and check out his website.
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