When struggling with one’s narrative poetry, sometimes it pays to look around the room.
Peter Robinson was born in Yorkshire in 1950. He studied English Literature at the University of Leeds. In 1974 He did a Master of Arts in English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, taught by Joyce Carol Oates, and he followed that with a PhD at York University Toronto.
His books are satisfying and absorbing as police procedural mysteries, enriched by the humanity of the characters, particularly Inspector Banks, who, naturally maybe, grows in complexity as his series progresses.
After all his studies, Peter was writing poetry and narrative poetry, when, one rainy summer, he found himself back in Yorkshire.
“I’ve Been Missing Something”
‘My dad, who was a great reader, had this Raymond Chandler omnibus, which I picked up. The first story I read was The Little Sister, and I remember thinking, right from the first page, Oh, I’ve been missing something.’
Peter read on, through all of Chandler, and then moved on to Georges Simenon’s Maigret stories. He thought, ‘Wow, here’s atmosphere for you, this guy can really write.’
Peter had always been a great reader of British crime, but the voices of those early hard-boiled writers really struck him. He began considering writing crime. But, inspired as he was, he knew enough about writing to realise that there was no future in imitation.
‘I’d love to write a really great American private-eye novel in the American style. But that’s a voice that is alien to me. I can appreciate the style, but if I try to write in it, it sounds false. It’s like my trying to speak with an American accent. … In terms of style, I probably have more in common with Victorian novelists than I do with American hard-boiled, first-person private-eye writers.’
Peter went on to write the wonderful Inspector Banks and Annie Cabbot novels, and to become one of the great British and Canadian detective writers.
Refs: J. Kingston Pierce, “There’s nothing dry about Peter Robinson” January Magazine
JOANNA BAKER 