Jake Kerridge in a Daily Telegraph<\/em> article<\/a> has discovered the merits of Lionel Davidson (died 2009).\u00a0 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\u2019s 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 \u201cfertility of invention and plausibility of narrative\u201d that characterised Rider Haggard and co.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 the novels are unmistakably the work of a writer from the generation that produced the Angry Young Men”.<\/p>\n

Over my career as bookseller and publisher spanning than the last two decades. I had sold collectible copies of his early Davidson\u00a0 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 \u2013 an overview essay, <\/a>a recorded interview and an annotated bibliography including his screenplays. He graciously accepted and the book (also about Dick Francis) was published in 2006.\u00a0 Masters of Crime: Lionel Davidson and Dick Francis<\/strong><\/em> was issued as a trade paperback and also as a leather bound, illustrated signed limited.<\/p>\n

After Lionel Davidson had past away in 2009 I was discussing a Scorpion edition of the Crime Writers’ Association collection of stories, Original Sins<\/em><\/strong> with editor Martin Edwards. I like to include additional material on crime writers and Martin suggested I write about Lionel.\u00a0 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\u00a0 was not widely known today even among other writers and <\/a>reviewers.\u00a0 Those that knew him well had passed on.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Take for example, The Chelsea Murders<\/em> (1978) which was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Both the tribute book and the CWA collection is available in the shop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jake Kerridge in a Daily Telegraph article has discovered the merits of Lionel Davidson (died 2009).\u00a0 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: … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1991,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[220,53,156],"class_list":["post-1954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-cwa","tag-lionel-davidson","tag-martin-edwards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secure.scorpionpress.org.uk\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secure.scorpionpress.org.uk\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secure.scorpionpress.org.uk\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secure.scorpionpress.org.uk\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secure.scorpionpress.org.uk\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1954"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secure.scorpionpress.org.uk\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2044,"href":"https:\/\/secure.scorpionpress.org.uk\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1954\/revisions\/2044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secure.scorpionpress.org.uk\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secure.scorpionpress.org.uk\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secure.scorpionpress.org.uk\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secure.scorpionpress.org.uk\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}