Following traditions of donnish wit, romance, and scientific interest represented variously by G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, and Michael Innes, Peter Dickinson has written among the most imaginative and bizarre detective novels of the 1970s and 1980s. His specialty has been to place exotic, imagined worlds next to the everyday world of conventional detective fiction, and then to carry the play of investigation freely from one to the other. At Dickinson's best his invention not only renews the genre but makes it thoughtful in ways seldom found in the work of other detective writers.

Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson was born in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), in 1927. His father, Richard Sebastian Willoughby Dickinson, assistant chief secretary of the Rhodesian colonial government, was the second son of Baron Dickinson, barrister, royal commissioner, and MP, who was one originator of the League of Nations. Dickinson's eldest brother has...