Anniversaries, 7 March
William Boyd
The British author William Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana. His father, a doctor, and his mother, a teacher, moved to The British Gold Coast in 1950, and Boyd grew up in a house full of black servants. The British Gold Coast became independent Ghana when he was five years old, and the family moved to Nigeria, whose independence in 1960 was followed by military coups and civil war. The war in Biafra deeply affected him as a teenager.
Boyd spent nine years at the Gordonstoun boarding school in...
Anniversaries, 7 March
Robert Harris
Robert Dennis Harris is a British author born in Nottingham where his father worked at a printing plant. When he was very young Harris decided that he too wanted to work with text and print. The family moved to Leicestershire when he was nine. He attended Belvoir High School at Bottesford and 1971–75 King Edward VII School at Melton Mowbray. He then went on to read English and history at Selwyn College, Cambridge, graduating in 1978.
Harris then worked for the BBC in London before he was p...
Anniversaries, 7 March
Léo Malet
French author born as Léon Malet in Montpellier. Having lost his parents when he was four years old, he was raised by his paternal grandparents. He left school at an early age and started to work, among other things, in a bank and in a factory. In his spare time he sold anarchist magazines. When he was sixteen he ran off to Paris where he tried to make a living singing at a cabaret in Montmartre and mixing with anarchists. After having been arrested several times for loitering, he was sent ...
Theme article
History of crime fiction
By: Johan Wopenka
Literary figures
Jack Tallon
Gender: Male
Police officer Jack Tallon is utterly bored by Pasadena, where he works, and gratefully accepts the offer of the job of police chief in little Whitewater. The very bigoted small-town population are wary of a stranger, and his is suspected – among other things – of rape. In three books by John Ball, Jack Tallon struggles not only to solve crimes, but also to deal with the suspicious attitude of the...