Dickinson creates multifaceted male characters and is especially skillful at sensitive and accurate depiction of female characters. His women are competitive, clever, and highly competent; his men, as he himself says in
Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers (1980), are "weedy." He intensely illuminates both individual characters as well as the complex weave of human relationships. Dickinson is also a children's author, creating credible adolescent characters and writing fantastic plots.
Peter Dickinson was born on 16 December 1927 in Livingston, Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, the son of a colonial civil servant, the Honorable Richard Sebastian Willoughby Dickinson, and May Southey (Lovemore) Dickinson, the daughter of a South African farmer. The Dickinsons belonged to the upper bourgeoisie, or squirearchy, mainly lawyers and high- ranking military officers. Peter Dickinson's father was assistant chief secretary of the Rhodesian colonial government, and his grandfather was a noted barrister, member of Parliament, and one of the originators of the League of Nations, who in 1930 was created first Baron Dickinson (hence the courtesy title of "Honorable" carried by his father, and in time by Dickinson and his two younger brothers, his elder brother inheriting the barony on their grandfather's death).
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