Peter Dickinson (Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson) Biography

British writer, born in Zambia, educated at King's College, Cambridge. He is the author of a number of successful and original children's books, of which the best-known are perhaps the trilogy The Weathermonger (1968), Heartsease (1969), and The Devil's Children (1970). He has also written detective stories which are distinguished, above all, by a series of striking and memorable settings: the first, Skin Deep (1968; US title The Glass-Sided Ant's Nest), concerns the murder of the head of a New Guinea tribe installed in a Victorian house in London by a rich anthropologist. Equally unusual are The Green Gene (1973) and The Poison Oracle (1974), while King and Joker (1976) has as its characters an imaginary English royal family. His later novels, though often involving a crime, have moved away from the detective story genre (The Last House Party, 1982; Skeleton-in-Waiting, 1989).