Author: Peter Robinson

Armley, in Leeds, produced the detective novelist who then spent nearly all his working life in Canada. Peter Robinson read English at Leeds, moved to Ontario in 1974, took an MA at Windsor under Joyce Carol Oates and a doctorate at York University in Toronto, and taught at colleges around the city while writing the Yorkshire books that made his name. Gallows View (1987) introduced Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks and reached the shortlist for the Arthur Ellis and the John Creasey; he won seven Arthur Ellis awards later, and twenty seven more Banks novels followed, set in and around the invented dales town of Eastvale, and ITV adapted them from 2010 with Stephen Tompkinson in the part. Sleeping in the Ground, the twenty fourth, opens with a gunman firing on a wedding party outside a Yorkshire church. The bride is among those killed. Banks, by now a superintendent, is given a profiler he has history with, Jenny Fuller, and the trail runs back decades into an older case. Robinson kept a house in the Beaches in Toronto and a cottage at Richmond in North Yorkshire. He died on 4 October 2022, aged 72.