Intuitive historian of the English detective novel: Obituary: Robert Barnard, 23-11-1936 to 19-09-2013

Robert Barnard, a sensitive and intuitive historian of the English detective novel, died on 19 September in Yorkshire, in the city of Leeds, where he had made his home for more than 30 years. Beginning early in his continuously successful career, Barnard had a fine reputation for his studies of the detective stories created by Agatha Christie and many other English 'crime' writers; and, largely simultaneously, for his own creative writing of remarkable mystery novels of great panache. These constituted a mix of detection plots and wicked comedy-of-manners stories, the last to be set particularly in seemingly unremarkable English micro-societies and, especially, in pretentious, strangely secluded schools or in apparently peacefully slumbering villages largely in the east and north of England.