The crime writer Peter Robinson has died aged 72, his publisher has announced.
The Yorkshire-born author died suddenly on the 4 October after a brief illness, publisher Hodder & Stoughton said. Robinson was best known for his novels featuring Inspector Banks, the first of which was published 35 years ago. The books were adapted into the TV drama series DCI Banks which ran between 2010 and 2016, and starred Stephen Tompkinson in the titular role.
A total of 8.75m books were sold by Robinson’s UK publishers Hodder & Stoughton and Pan Macmillan during his lifetime, and the books have been translated into 19 different languages. His editor at Hodder, Carolyn Mays, said: “Peter was a combination of all the best bits of his detective Alan Banks – thoughtful and passionate about justice, he had fine taste and a totally down to earth view of the world.”
She added that he was “an immensely talented writer” whose work included poetry and short stories as well as his popular thrillers. “His novels are superbly plotted (one reviewer said he had the precision of Swiss watchmaker) and the settings are vivid and fully real,” she said. “But it’s the richness and depth of his characters that keep the readers – including me – coming back for more.”
Robinson was born in Leeds in 1950, and much of his fiction was set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Eastvale. The author emigrated to Canada to continue his studies after completing an English degree at the University of Leeds, undertaking an MA in English and creative writing at the University of Windsor, where Joyce Carol Oates was his tutor, and then a PhD in English at York University in Toronto.
Robinson was based in Canada for the rest of his life, living in the Beaches area of Toronto with his wife, Sheila Halladay, and occasionally teaching crime writing at the University of Toronto.
Fellow crime author Val McDermid tweeted about the news, commenting that she and Robinson were both first published in the same year, 1987. “Our paths often crossed, (usually accompanied by beer) in Canada and his beloved Yorkshire. Condolences to Sheila,” she said.
