Andrew Taylor (author)

Last updated
Andrew Taylor at Rossiter Books Monmouth 21 February 2024.jpg

Andrew Taylor (born 14 October 1951) is a British author best known for his crime and historical novels, which include the Lydmouth series, the Roth Trilogy and historical novels such as the number-one best-selling The American Boy and The Ashes of London. His accolades include the Diamond Dagger, Britain's top crime-writing award.

Contents

Biography

Andrew Taylor grew up in East Anglia. He read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and has an MA in Library, Archive and Information Science from University College London [1] .

His first novel, Caroline Minuscule (1982), won the John Creasey Memorial Award of the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain. He is the only author to have won the CWA's Historical Dagger three times, with The Office of the Dead, The American Boy and The Scent of Death. He has also won the Cartier Diamond Dagger, [2] for sustained excellence in crime writing and has been shortlisted for the Gold Dagger, the Theakston's Old Peculiar (twice), and the Edgar award. Bleeding Heart Square won Sweden's Martin Beck Award, the Golden Crowbar, in 2009. The King's Evil won the Gold Crown for the best historical novel of the year [3] . He was inducted into The Detection Club in 1995.

The American Boy, a gothic mystery linked to Edgar Allan Poe's boyhood years in England, was one of the ten titles featured in Channel 4's Richard and Judy Book Club 2005 and was also selected for The Times Top Ten Crime Novels of the Decade.

The Roth Trilogy (now also available in an omnibus edition as Requiem for an Angel) was shown on ITV in March 2007. It was a three-part drama series under the title of Fallen Angel , starring Charles Dance and Emilia Fox. The series was broadcast on three consecutive nights, beginning 11 March 2007.

His most recent books are historical novels as well as crime fiction. They explore different historical eras: Bleeding Heart Square, is set in the 1930s mainly in London (2008); The Anatomy of Ghosts (2010), set in eighteenth-century Cambridge; The Scent of Death, set in British New York, 1778–80; and its sequel, The Silent Boy (2014), during the French Revolution.

The Ashes of London (2016) is set during and just after the Great Fire of 1666. It is the first of a series set in Restoration England. The paperback edition was made Waterstone's thriller of the month for two consecutive months through January and February 2017 and was the number one bestseller for eight weeks in The Times/Waterstones chart. In 2018 he published a sequel- The Fire Court, and the third of the series, The King's Evil, was released in March 2019. The series continued with The Last Protector (2020), The Royal Secret (2021) and The Shadows of London (2023).

Andrew Taylor has also written a number of novellas with ghostly or other-worldly themes, originally as Kindle Singles. Three have been collected under the title Fireside Gothic (2016).

He has reviewed in many publications, in particular the Spectator [4] (whose crime fiction reviewer he was for ten years) and The Times . [5] He has also written short stories and articles on crime fiction. He has contributed the Grub Street column to The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors 2003-21. [6] He edited The Author 2004-06 [7] . He has also taught fiction courses for the Arvon Foundation [8] and elsewhere.

He is married with two children. He and his family have lived for many years in Coleford in the Forest of Dean on the borders of England and Wales.

Bibliography

Dougal series

Sergeant Jim Bergerac series (written as Andrew Saville)

Blaines novels

Lydmouth series (Richard Thornhill & Jill Francis)

Roth trilogy

Children's novels

Psychological thrillers

Historical novels

Marwood and Lovett series

Short Stories

Other

Journalism

Essays

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edith Pargeter</span> British writer (1913–1995)

Edith Mary Pargeter, also known by her pen name Ellis Peters, was an English author of works in many categories, especially history and historical fiction, and was also honoured for her translations of Czech classics. She is probably best known for her murder mysteries, both historical and modern, and especially for her medieval detective series The Cadfael Chronicles.

Lindsey Davis is an English historical novelist, best known as the author of the Falco series of historical crime stories set in ancient Rome and its empire. She is a recipient of the Cartier Diamond Dagger award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">P. D. James</span> English crime writer

Phyllis Dorothy James White, Baroness James of Holland Park,, known professionally as P. D. James, was an English novelist and life peer. Her rise to fame came with her series of detective novels featuring the police commander and poet, Adam Dalgliesh.

Reginald Charles Hill FRSL was an English crime writer and the winner in 1995 of the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the prestigious Detection Club in 1978.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Rendell</span> English writer (1930–2015)

Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, was an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Rankin</span> Scottish writer

Sir Ian James Rankin is a Scottish crime writer and philanthropist, best known for his Inspector Rebus novels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sara Paretsky</span> American author of detective fiction

Sara Paretsky is an American author of detective fiction, best known for her novels focused on the protagonist V. I. Warshawski.

Christopher John Sansom was a British writer of historical crime novels, best known for his Matthew Shardlake series. He also wrote the spy novel Winter in Madrid and the alternate history novel Dominion. He won numerous book awards, including the 2005 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2013 and the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2022. Shardlake, a television series based on Sansom's novel Dissolution, started streaming on Disney+ less than a week after his death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">H. R. F. Keating</span> English crime fiction writer

Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating was an English crime fiction writer most notable for his series of novels featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lionel Davidson</span> English writer (1922–2009)

Lionel Davidson FRSL was an English novelist who wrote spy thrillers. He received Authors' Club Best First Novel Award once and the Gold Dagger Award three times.

The Crime Writers' Association (CWA) is a specialist authors' organisation in the United Kingdom, most notable for its "Dagger" awards for the best crime writing of the year, and the Diamond Dagger awarded to an author for lifetime achievement. The Association also promotes crime writing of fiction and non-fiction by holding annual competitions, publicising literary festivals and establishing links with libraries, booksellers and other writer organisations, both in the UK such as the Society of Authors, and overseas. The CWA enables members to network at its annual conference and through its regional chapters as well as through dedicated social media channels and private website. Members' events and general news items are published on the CWA website, which also features Find An Author, where CWA members are listed and information provided about themselves, their books and their awards.

John Harvey is a British author of crime fiction most famous for his series of jazz-influenced Charlie Resnick novels, based in the City of Nottingham. He is also a screenwriter and poet.

The CWA Diamond Dagger is an award given by the Crime Writers' Association of the United Kingdom to authors who have made an outstanding lifetime's contribution to the genre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Lovesey</span> British writer (b. 1936)

Peter Harmer Lovesey, also known by his pen name Peter Lear, is a British writer of historical and contemporary detective novels and short stories. His best-known series characters are Sergeant Cribb, a Victorian-era police detective based in London, and Peter Diamond, a modern-day police detective in Bath.

Robert Barnard was an English crime writer, critic and lecturer. In addition to over 40 books published under his own name, he also published four books under the pseudonym Bernard Bastable.

Kinn Hamilton McIntosh, known professionally as Catherine Aird, is an English novelist. She is the author of more than twenty crime fiction novels and several collections of short stories. Her witty, literate, and deftly plotted novels straddle the "cozy" and "police procedural" genres and are somewhat similar in flavour to those of Martha Grimes, Caroline Graham, M. C. Beaton, Margaret Yorke, and Pauline Bell. She was inducted into the prestigious Detection Club in 1981, and is a recipient of the 2015 Cartier Diamond Dagger award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Cleeves</span> British novelist (born 1954)

Ann Cleeves is a British mystery crime writer. She wrote the Vera Stanhope, Jimmy Perez, and Matthew Venn series, all three of which have been adapted into TV shows. In 2006 she won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger for her novel Raven Black, the first novel in the Jimmy Perez series.

Margaret Beda Nicholson, known professionally as Margaret Yorke, was an English crime fiction writer.

Camille Verhœven series is an oeuvre of the crime genre by French author Pierre Lemaitre. The books initially written in French have been translated into English. The first three books in the series have been nominated to the shortlist in CWA International Dagger award and two have garnered the prestigious award.

David John Young is an English novelist whose crime thriller series featuring a fictional Volkspolizei detective, Karin Müller, is set in 1970s East Germany. Young's debut novel Stasi Child won the 2016 CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger for the best historical crime novel of the year. Both it and the follow-up, Stasi Wolf, were longlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award in 2016 and 2017 respectively. In 2017, Bonnier Zaffre, the UK adult fiction division of the Bonnier Group, announced Young had signed a six-figure deal for three further novels in the series, making five in all, with the third, A Darker State, being published in February 2018. Young says the inspiration for the series came after his indie pop band The Candy Twins toured Germany in 2007 and he read Anna Funder's non-fiction book Stasiland between gigs. He secured the tour thanks to favourable comments made by Edwyn Collins about a tribute song Young wrote about him. Before becoming a full-time novelist, Young was a news producer and editor for more than 25 years with BBC World Service radio and BBC World TV.

References

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.