Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson was a British-Canadian crime novelist best known for the Inspector Alan Banks series, a long-running police procedural set in and around the fictional Yorkshire town of Eastvale. Beginning with Gallows View in 1987, the series followed Banks from a detective inspector recently relocated from London through decades of promotions and cases, building a richly realized cast of colleagues, most notably DS (later DCI) Annie Cabbot, alongside Banks's own evolving personal life. The series was adapted for British television as DCI Banks, which ran for five series on ITV.

Robinson was born in Yorkshire but spent much of his adult life in Toronto, and his books are noted for combining traditional English procedural detail with psychologically probing character work and a strong sense of Yorkshire landscape and culture. He also wrote a number of standalone thrillers and short fiction outside the Banks series. New readers are generally advised to start with Gallows View, though the series is often praised for individual entries working well even out of sequence given Robinson's skill at reintroducing characters and context. Robinson died in October 2022, shortly after completing what became the final Banks novel, Standing in the Shadows, published posthumously in 2023.