John Lawton (author)


John Lawton is a television producer/director and author of historical/crime/espionage novels set primarily in Britain during World War II and the Cold War.

Biography

Lawton worked briefly in London publishing prior to becoming, by the mid-1980s, a documentary television producer at the newly created Channel 4. In 1993 he settled in New York, and in 1995 won a WH Smith Award for his third book Black Out. He went back into television in England in 1997, and by 1999 had dropped off the TV and books map completely. He returned in 2001 with Riptide, which was snapped up by Columbia Pictures. For most of the 21st century, so far, he has tended to be elusive and itinerant, residing in England, the United States and Italy. He appeared in New York, in 2008, with a reading in Greenwich Village. Earlier the same year he was named in the Daily Telegraph as one of "50 Crime Writers To Read Before You Die". In October 2010 he read in Ottawa, Toronto, Portland and Seattle, ending up at the Mysterious Book Store in Tribeca, and later that year was named in the New York Times Reviews "Pick of the Year" for his novel A Lily of the Field.
Many of the biography pages within Lawton's books have a decidedly tongue-in-cheek bent, with hobbies listed as the "cultivation of the onion and obscure varieties of potato", or "growing leeks". Those close to him would stress that such descriptions are meant quite seriously. His author bio notes that "since 2000 he has lived in the high, wet hills of Derbyshire England, with frequent excursions into the high, dry hills of Arizona and Italy."

Frederick Troy novels

The novels in the Frederick Troy series share the eponymous protagonist Frederick Troy, the younger son of a Russian immigrant father who has become a wealthy newspaper publisher and baronet. Defying class and family expectations, the independently wealthy Troy joins Scotland Yard, becoming an investigator on the "murder squad". The rights to the fourth novel in the series were purchased by Columbia Pictures several years ago. The rest have been optioned repeatedly, in both England and the USA, but, so far, nothing has ever made it to the screen, large or small.
The series, in published order:
The series in plot-chronological order: