Kings and Queens of Crime

Essays on major Crime Writers

Keith Miles on John Creasey (1908-73)

Having read only a hundred of John Creasey's novels, I can lay no claim to being an expert on his work, because he wrote six times that number. He used over twenty pseudonyms, Floating on the huge torrent of crime fiction you will also find westerns written by Tex Riley or William K.Reilly and romances by Margaret Cooke or Elise Fecamps.

When he founded the Crime Writers' Association in 1953. he and his noms de plume outnumbered the total membership.

He is best remembered for The Toff series about a gentleman adventurer; The Baron series (written as Anthony Morton) about the dashing, wealthy owner of a chain of antique shops; the Inspector West series about a detective who went on to become the youngest ever Chief Superintendent at Scotland Yard; and the Dr Palfrey series later merging with the Department Z series - which dealt with the constant struggle waged by a dedicated group of men against mad scientists in search of world domination.

But his most important achievement was the Gideon series, written under the pseudonym of J.J.Marric (John, wife jean, sons Martin and Richard), When a police inspector, who happened to be a neighbour, challenged him to " show us as we are", Creasey reached for his pen and wrote Gideon's Day (1955).

It was not simply the opening shot in another long-running series; it was effectively the first British police procedural novel, a careful, accurate, almost documentary account of a police investigation headed by Detective-Superintendent George Gideon of Scotland Yard. John Ford saw its potential and directed the 1958 film version with Jack Hawkins in the role of the big, slow-moving, quietly-spoken Gideon. In 1965, John Gregson took the title role in Gideon C.I.D., a television drama series which ran for twenty-six episodes. By comparison with today's TV policeman, Gideon looks dated, naive and under-resourced, but he was the true pioneer of the sub-genre in Britain.

Gideon's Day was such a convincing account of police procedure at the time that many readers thought it must have been written by an insider.

Though they examine the step-by-step progress of investigations, the novels are by no means propaganda exercises on behalf of the police. Creasey dealt head-on with the problems of professional incompetence and police corruption. Murder. rape, arson. armed robbery, child abuse, the desecration of churches and many other crimes land up on Gideon's desk.

John Creasey's books have the inevitable faults of mass production. They are repetitive. formulaic and riddled with clichés. They lack the felicities of mandarin prose. But at their best - in the Gideon series - they rise above the level of a standardised product. They look at the nature and purpose of law enforcement with a critical eye and they visit some of the darkest corners of the criminal world.

Most of all, they show the energy, the versatility and the sheer professionalism of John Creasey. Six hundred books plus short stories, articles, speeches, a lively private life (four marriages) and doomed attempts to become a Member of Parliament for his own All Party Alliance in England......

... Yet he still found time to create the Crime Writers' Association and to fuel it with his enthusiasm.

How did he get started?

In a blizzard of over seven hundred rejection slips.

How did he achieve so enormous an output?

By producing 10.000 words a day, a book a week, not stopping for time-wasting research, - "Write first then research"- and relying on devoted editors to supply corrections for two rewrites...

So... postpone research...Keep writing!

Keith Miles