British-Canadian crime writer Peter Robinson, who kept readers in suspense with his long-running Inspector Banks series, has died.
Robinson’s publisher McClelland & Stewart says he died in Toronto on Tuesday after a brief illness. He was 72.
Robinson chronicled the capers of British detective Alan Banks in more than 25 novels that have been translated around the world.
The series started with “Gallows View” in 1987, which won Robinson his first of seven Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Awards.
Several of the novels were adapted for the screen, including the British TV series “DCI Banks,” which aired from 2010 to 2016.
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Jared Bland, outgoing publisher of McClelland & Stewart, says Robinson transcended the tropes of the crime genre to write “human novels.”
“Peter wrote about the darkest of things, but never without the light of hope on the horizon, and always with a finely attuned sense of the fragility and beauty of the human experience,” Bland said in a statement Friday.
Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1950, Robinson came to Canada to earn a master’s in creative writing at University of Windsor, followed by a PhD in English at York University.
He taught at a number of universities and colleges in Toronto, where he lived with his wife, Sheila Halladay.
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