Peter Robinson

• Born: March 17, 1950
• Birthplace: Castleford, Yorkshire, England
• Died: October 4, 2022
• Place of death: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Type of Plot: Police procedural

Principal Series: Chief Inspector Alan Banks, 1987-

Contribution

Nearly every published work by Peter Robinson has been on a best-seller list or earned some sort of recognition. Robinson received an Arthur Ellis Award for best short story in 1990 for “Innocence”; Arthur Ellis awards in 1990 and 1991 for The Hanging Valley (1989) and Past Reason Hated (1991); an Author’s Award from the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters in 1995 for Final Account (1994); an Arthur Ellis Award in 1996 for Innocent Graves (1996); and the Barry Award in 1999, the Anthony Award in 2000, Sweden’s Martin Beck Award in 2001, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 2001 for In a Dry Season (1999). His novel Cold Is the Grave (2000) won an Arthur Ellis Award in 2000 as well as the Palle Rosen Krantz Award for the Danish edition. His short stories have won the Ellis, the Edgar, the Macavity, and other honors. He has been translated into more than fifteen languages. He creates dignified yet riveting, mostly gore-free tales with a concentration on both the key characters and the intriguing landscape, in the manner of his inspiration, writer Ruth Rendell. He wanted, he says, to write social and psychological crime novels to gain insight into society and individuals and to investigate crimes in a particular region, in his case, Yorkshire, which he adds, is actually the main character of his series.

Biography

Peter Eliot Robinson was born in Castleford, Yorkshire, England, on March 17, 1950, to Clifford Robinson, a photographer, and Miriam Jarvis Robinson. There were not many books in his boyhood home, reading being a luxury for hard-working people, but he was encouraged to use the library. The family did not have a television set until Robinson was the age of twelve, so he turned to radio and films to find wonderful adventure stories. One of his earliest memories is of his mother reading Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse (1877) to him at bedtime. He also remembers filling his notebooks with illustrations drawn from the tales of Robin Hood, William Tell, and King Arthur. He began writing poetry while still young, liking its structure and form, but grew bored and began experimenting with longer narrative works. The transition to fiction was easy.

In 1974, after earning his bachelor’s degree with honors in English literature from the University of Leeds, Robinson moved to Canada in hopes of studying creative writing under Joyce Carol Oates at the University of Windsor. His short-story and poetry submissions apparently did not impress Oates sufficiently, and he failed to gain admittance into her creative writing classes. However, two months into the semester, after hearing Robinson read some of his latest works, Oates asked why he was not studying with her. He explained and she declared him ready. Her tutelage was key in Robinson’s development as a writer. She gave direction but not too much, pointing out weaknesses as well as strengths, always expecting her students to fix the problems themselves, while being true to their own voices. He earned his master’s degree in 1975.

Teaching positions were not readily available in England, jobs having grown even more scarce after Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, so Robinson returned to Ontario and entered the doctoral program at York University, earning his doctorate in 1983. By that time, he and his lawyer wife, Sheila Halladay, had settled into permanent residence in the Beaches area of Toronto, and he had begun teaching college composition and literature classes. By the late 1990’s, he was able to devote full time to his writing.

Robinson’s interest in the mystery genre came as a surprise because he had never read, much less written, in that form. However, during a summer visit in Yorkshire, Robinson picked up one of the many books his father had been enjoying in his retirement, and he was fascinated, recognizing the potential for his own writing. He devoured works by Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon, then published his first Chief Inspector Alan Banks novel, Gallow’s View, in 1987.

Although all of Robinson’s works are set in Yorkshire, he finds it difficult to write about the area while he resides there. He suspects that this difficulty stems from the fact that as a young writer he lacked the confidence to enter the world of letters in a country with a prevailing class distinction, one that was more prevalent then. At the time, members of the working class simply were not expected to assume themselves capable of entering into a higher station in life, and they mostly stayed within the confines of what had been handed to them. Rather than try to buck the traditional system, the young Robinson decided he needed the aesthetic distance of Canada for his writing. He began spending his time divided between the two countries, returning to Yorkshire to reacquaint himself with the sounds, the smells, and the people who populate his novels. Although Canadians also tend to dismiss genre fiction, Robinson has been able to adopt a bemused attitude. Though he seldom makes the best-seller listings of major prestigious publications, he has a broad audience and has gained the respect of Italians, Americans, and Germans. However, he admits to still harboring a fear that one day he will be found out and will wind up “working at the yeast factory or the frozen food plant in Leeds.”

Analysis

Most of Peter Robinson’s novels are set in the fictional market town of Eastvale, in Yorkshire. His detective, Chief Inspector Alan Banks, formerly of the Metropolitan Police Service in London, has taken a job in a presumably quieter place with less prevalent and dramatic crime. Banks learns immediately that the job pressures are just as great despite the tranquil setting. Instead of having time to reflect on his life and to recoup from the hectic, fast-paced existence that threatened to unnerve him, he finds himself again at the core of turbulence and in the midst of bad people who do bad things as well as essentially good people who are driven to commit criminal acts.

Robinson’s stories usually start with a corpse found in some distinctive part of the Yorkshire countryside or its environs. Then Inspector Banks goes to work, using his journalistic approach to crime solving, which seeks the answers to the five w’s and an h: who, what, when, where, why, and how. Banks methodically delves into the dead person’s past, learning all he can about friends, family, neighbors, and the tenor of the times. He walks the streets, visits homes, confers with colleagues, and frequents the pubs with the locals. Many a clue emerges from a night of sampling local brews and old favorites. Banks’s cases are solved—although not all the criminals are always brought to justice—in jigsaw fashion, with starts and misses until the final pieces fit together.

Robinson says that he used to think quite a bit of his personality was reflected in Alan Banks until he began a closer examination of the inspector. Although, for example, they share the same interests in music, they went on separate paths in their late teens. In one of many revealing interviews, Robinson makes it clear that Banks has become a living entity. The author says that, in contrast to Banks, he is not as “temperamentally suited to deal with the officiousness” of such people as Bank’s superior Detective Chief Inspector Jeremiah Riddle. If Robinson were involved in a conflict with his supervisor, he would most likely quit the job. He concedes that Banks is “more physically astute, . . . [a] little scrapper, . . . not afraid of getting down and dirty.”

Robinson admits that he hates violence and gore, which perhaps accounts for his declining of invitations to sit in on autopsies to add greater authority to his writing. Most of the novels’ despicable acts occur offstage. He does not believe that a graphic accounting of bloody acts is always necessary; however, when he feels that it is essential for the plot, he does not spare the details.

The Hanging Valley

In The Hanging Valley, Robinson describes a gruesome scene involving the discovery of the body of a murder victim, hidden by rocks, with the head smashed beyond recognition, infested with maggots, and surrounded by flies. Robinson describes the corpse’s face gone but moving, the “flesh . . . literally crawling,” the maggots “wriggling under his clothes [making] it look as if the body were rippling like water in the breeze.” Robinson felt that these details were integral to the plot and used his narrative skills to bring the moment to disgusting life. In a less repulsive passage, one very telling of the essence of British life, he describes the typical English breakfast, consisting of “two fried eggs, two thick rashers of Yorkshire bacon, Cumberland sausage, grilled mushrooms and tomato, with two slices of fried bread to mop it all up.” This repast was preceded by grapefruit juice and cereal and followed by toast and marmalade.

In a Dry Season

In the novel In a Dry Season, Robinson excels in conveying the stunning bucolic environs while uncovering nasty little secrets. He also delves deeply into his protagonist’s personality and his recurrent bouts of depression. This time, Inspector Banks is going through a serious midlife crisis: His wife has divorced him for a younger man, his son is dropping out of college to become a rock musician, his antagonistic superior Detective Chief Inspector Riddle has taken him off the active force and assigned him a desk job in the equivalent of police Siberia. As Banks struggles to understand his deep depression, he gains a kind of self-awareness that may not significantly alter his bouts of melancholia but will help him regain the confidence to go on to new tasks. He is asked to lead an investigation with another police force outcast, Detective Sergeant Annie Cabbot, in a case that the London division thinks of as a joke. His nemesis, Chief Inspector Riddle, hopes that an ages-old crime in the remote Yorkshire Dales, which took place in a period when few murders and no missing persons were reported, will herald the end of Banks’s career and will show him that, at fifty, he is too old. The assignment will intrigue any mystery lover—to identify the bones uncovered when a drained reservoir reveals the remains of an old village. A critic credits Robinson with a work that “stands out for its psychological and moral complexity, its startling evocation of pastoral England, and its gritty compassionate portrayal of modern sleuthing.” Robinson nicely interweaves two periods—wartime and modern Yorkshire.

Piece of My Heart

Each novel in the series brings new personal and professional challenges for Inspector Banks. Piece of My Heart (2006) opens the day after Britain’s first outdoor rock concert in 1969, featuring the wildly popular Mad Hatters. During the cleanup of the grounds, a dead woman is discovered bundled up in a sleeping bag. An investigation fails to yield the identity of her killer. Thirty-five years later, Banks is called on to investigate another, presumably unrelated murder, of a journalist writing a piece on the Mad Hatters. Similarities soon become apparent as the detective’s work begins spanning the decades. Again Robinson uses the compelling device of exploring one period in history and another in recent times and bringing both together in a logical, believable resolution. Here Robinson is able to indulge his love of rock music, re-creating the mood of the past and the tenor of the present without a hint of bifurcation.

Alan Banks

The character of Alan Banks has evolved over the years. Each new case takes more of a toll on him. He has become more introspective and allows the reader glimpses into his past that help explain why he is the way he is. In later novels, he has a darker view of the world. Unlike Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, static protagonists who can be relied on to systematically solve crimes without any substantial changes to their personae, Banks is a modern detective and develops as an ordinary person would do. Banks’s evolving personality appears to appeal to the readers of the series, as the correspondence Robinson receives generally asks what will happen to Banks rather than questions about his plots.

When readers ask if Banks will ever settle down and find happiness, Robinson says he doubts that it is in Banks’s nature to embrace the day, but who knows? He likes to throw situations at Banks to see how he will handle them. He claims to have even been surprised by the divorce, especially with the twist of his wife leaving for someone younger. He says that he is writing about a man who just “happens to work as a policeman, and about the things that happen to him as he grows older.” He gets an idea and begins writing, not knowing where the story will go. He puts the character first and lets the plot develop because he believes that the plot stems from the main character. Possibly the key to the success of the series is that Banks is a kind of Everyman, with the same temptations, subject to the vagaries of life, which include losing power as he ages and having to settle for less.

Robinson does not want to be viewed as anything other than a writer of crime fiction. He says that when a work of crime fiction is described as a “literary thriller” or being a novel that “transcends the genre,” he feels that such language is condescending, as if being crime fiction were not enough.

Principal Series Character:

• Chief Inspector Alan Banks is somewhat of an anachronism on the London police force. He is an outsider and a rebel, more leftist than the typical officer. He cuts corners and defies authority but gets the job done. When he is reassigned to a more bucolic part of the country, Yorkshire, he brings his peccadilloes with him, falling into the same patterns of stress while continuing methodically and patiently to solve the puzzle of who did what to whom. He is intelligent, insightful, sometimes moody, grumpy, and even melancholic. He can be hard to work for, but few have serious complaints. He understands the frailties of both the victims and victimizers because he himself can be weak. He enjoys spending hours in the pub with his favored single malt scotch, smoking the cigarettes he is trying so hard to give up. His other constant comfort is music. His shaky marriage eventually ends in divorce; although he is uncomfortable in relationships, women love him.

Bibliography

Bethune, Brian. “Working-Class Boys Made Good.” McLean’s 117, no. 8 (February 23, 2004): 48-49. Discusses Canadian crime fiction and Robinson’s domination of the field.

Hanson, Gillian Mary. City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. A discussion of the importance of setting in British crime fiction. Sheds light on Robinson’s use of Yorkshire for his settings although it does not deal with him in particular.

Priestman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Contains a chapter on postwar British fiction that provides perspective on Robinson’s work.

Robinson, Peter. “Peter Robinson.” Interview. Writer 116, no. 9 (September, 2003): 66. Short biography of the writer, plus answers to questions regarding how he writes and why.

Robinson, Peter. Peter Robinson: Author of the Inspector Banks novels. http://www.peterrobinsonbooks.com. The author’s Web site provides information on the author’s life, his books, and upcoming events.

Windolf, Jim. “Soundtrack for Murder.” Review of Piece of My Heart, by Peter Robinson. The New York Times Review of Books, July 2, 2006, p. 9. Reviewer praises Piece of My Heart and notes how Inspector Banks’s personal life is developed with each work in the series. Briefly discusses the series and its development.