John Wainwright

John William Wainwright (25 February 1921 – 19 September 1995) was an English crime novelist and author of 83 books, four of which have been published under the pen name Jack Ripley. He also wrote some short stories (mostly uncollected in book format), seven radio plays, and an indefinite amount of magazine articles and newspaper columns. Wainwright was born in Hunslet, an area of inner-city south Leeds, in 1921. He left school at fifteen and served as a rear gunner in Lancaster bombers during the Second World War. In 1947 he joined the West Riding Constabulary as a Police Constable. While serving as a policeman, he went back to studying in his spare time – earning himself a law degree in 1956 – and in 1965 he tried writing a crime novel, which was accepted by George Hardinge, the editor of Collins Crime Club, and published as Death in a Sleeping City. In 1966 Wainwright left the force and became a full-time novelist. In 1968 Hardinge became senior editor at Macmillan Publishers, taking Wainwright's contract with him. Wainwright died in Blackpool in 1995, a few months after the publication of his last novel, The Life and Times of Christmas Calvert... Assassin. An extremely prolific author – from 1966 to 1984 he kept an average of three books a year – Wainwright published 78 crime novels, a short-story collection and four non-fiction works, including two autobiographical volumes, Tail-End Charlie and Wainwright's Beat; a career guide, Shall I Be a Policeman? (1967), and a ho…