Peter Guttridge

Peter Guttridge (born in Burnley, Lancashire) is an English novelist and critic.^[1]

He was educated at Burnley Grammar School, the University of Oxford and the University of Nottingham. He is a former director of the Brighton Literature Festival and remains a regular chairperson at major UK book festivals. In 2014 he established Books By The Beach, the Scarborough Book Festival, which runs each April, and remained director until 2018.^[2] A freelance journalist for twenty years, specialising in literature and film, he has interviewed numerous writers from around the world and many high-profile actors and film directors.^[3] He has also written about astanga vinyasa yoga.^[4] He was the Observer newspaper’s crime fiction critic 1999-2011.^[5]

Between 1996 and 2005 he wrote an award-winning series of satirical crime novels featuring a yoga-obsessed journalist, Nick Madrid, and his tough-as-nails sidekick, Bridget Frost.^[6][7] His latest publications are the non-comic Brighton crime trilogy: The City of Dreadful Night, The Last King of Brighton and The Thing Itself (formerly God's Lonely Man).^[8] The Trilogy and later Brighton books are published in French by Le Rouergue.^[9] The other Brighton novels so far in what is now the Brighton series are:The Devil's Moon (2013);Those Who Feel Nothing (2014 - and in its French edition in 2016); Swimming With The Dead (2019); The Lady of The Lake (2019); Butcher's Wood (2021). He has written an e-thriller, Paradise Island. An e-novella, The Belgian and The Beekeeper, is set on the Sussex Downs in 1916, where Sherlock Holmes is asked by a celebrated foreign detective to investigate Dr Watson.^[10]

• No Laughing Matter. Headline. 1997. ISBN 978-0-7472-5645-8. (reprint Speck Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-9725776-4-9)
• A Ghost of A Chance (1998)
• Two To Tango (1998)
• The Once and Future Con (1999)
• Foiled Again (2001)
• Cast Adrift (2004)
• City of Dreadful Night (2010)
• The Last King of Brighton (2011)
• The Thing Itself (2012)
• The Belgian and The Beekeeper (novella, e-book original, 2012)
• The Devil's Moon (2013)
• Those Who Feel Nothing (2014)
• Paradise Island (e-thriller original, 2014)
• Swimming With The Dead (2019)
• The Lady of the Lake (2019)
• Butcher's Wood (2021)

• Don’t Think of Tigers [Editor] (2001)
• The Great Detective; (The Mammoth Book of Comic Crime, 2002)
• The Postman Only Rings When He Can Be Bothered (The Mammoth Book of Comic Crime, 2002; Crime Scenes, 2008)
• The Library Sign (The Illustrated Brighton Moment, 2008)
• The Man With The Pram (Criminal Tendencies, 2009)
• God's Lonely Man ('The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime", 2014 - this story the winner of the 2013 Graham Greene International Festival Short Story Competition)
• The Box-Shaped Mystery (Winner Margery Allingham Short Story Competition 2016)
• Normal Rules Do Not Apply (Ten Year Stretch 2018)

• The Great Train Robbery (2008)^[11]

• Barry Forshaw: British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia (Greenwood World Publishing)

• Official site
• Deckchair Interview