Jake Kerridge in a Daily Telegraph article has discovered the merits of Lionel Davidson (died 2009). In a broad and beautifully empathetic article Jake paints a picture of the British thriller writer who was one of the best of his day. Here is a taster: “Davidson’s snaffling of the narrative devices of the old adventure writers was committed in cold blood. When he began writing in the late Fifties, he was a hard-up freelance journalist with a wife and two sons to support, and set out quite deliberately to write a bestseller. And so he studied and emulated the chart-busters of the past, trying to replicate the combination of “fertility of invention and plausibility of narrative” that characterised Rider Haggard and co.
But what stops his books from being pastiches of a genre that was dead as a dodo is his style. Sceptical, iconoclastic, shorn of pretension and concerned with the way ordinary people think and behave – the novels are unmistakably the work of a writer from the generation that produced the Angry Young Men”.
Over my career as bookseller and publisher spanning than the last two decades. I had sold collectible copies of his early Davidson books to customers and talked over why they were drawn to this particular author. Occasionally I wrote to Lionel to pass on pertinent comments and enquire about his next book. A subject on which he was less than forthright. Then about ten years ago I suggested that we co-operate on a book about his work – an overview essay, 
a recorded interview and an annotated bibliography including his screenplays. He graciously accepted and the book (also about Dick Francis) was published in 2006. Masters of Crime: Lionel Davidson and Dick Francis was issued as a trade paperback and also as a leather bound, illustrated signed limited.
After Lionel Davidson had past away in 2009 I was discussing a Scorpion edition of the Crime Writers’ Association collection of stories, Original Sins with editor Martin Edwards. I like to include additional material on crime writers and Martin suggested I write about Lionel. You see the story about Lionel as a literary man, his connections, and his efforts to be a film maker, as well as children’s author was not widely known today even among other writers and 
reviewers. Those that knew him well had passed on.
His novels were dashed out in between other tasks often in only a few weeks, and was genuinely surprised when he won award after award. Take for example, The Chelsea Murders (1978) which was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger. Did he research the setting – not a bit of it – he was living in Israel at the time and like his other famous books set in far away places he simply imagined it all.
Both the tribute book and the CWA collection is available in the shop.
