| Abstrakt: |
The first of Peter Dickinson’s James Pibble series, Skin Deep (1968)—published in the United States under the title The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest—signaled the emergence of a major, if offbeat, talent. Even before he finished with the Pibble series, Dickinson had begun writing non-series crime novels, many of them with historical settings. One of the most stylistically innovative writers in the field, Dickinson often tested or redefined the boundaries of crime fiction. His characters are unconventional, his settings are exotic or deliberately disturbing, and his plots, especially in the later non-series novels, vie with mainstream fiction in their complex juxtapositions of past and present. Although Pibble is too eccentric a police officer to have inspired many imitators, Dickinson’s non-series novels may justly be compared with those of his contemporary Ruth Rendell for their creative blurring of the distinctions between crime writing and mainstream fiction, thus clearing fresh ground for the generation of writers who followed. |
