Maurice Procter

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Maurice Procter (1906-1973) was an English novelist. He was born in Nelson, Lancashire.

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[edit] Biography

Born in Nelson, Lanashire, Maurice Procter worked as a policeman in the Halifax and Calderwood areas for 19 years, experiencing police procedure and detection first hand, as well as the ciminal profiles and minds that went with the job. It was this 'lively realism' in Procters work that many reviewers praised.

He wrote and rewrote novels while working, until he eventually found a publisher at 41, and resigned from the force to follow his writing career.

Procter is best known for his series of police procedural novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Harry Martineau of the Granchester City Police ("Granchester" being an industrial metropolis in the north of England that was, apparently, intended as a thinly fictionalized depiction of Manchester).

The first entry in this series, Hell Is a City (published in the US as Somewhere in This City), was filmed in 1960 with Stanley Baker as Martineau. As if to confirm the inference that Granchester was a fictional doppelganger for Manchester, the movie was shot on-location in Manchester.

Procter died in Halifax in 1973.

[edit] Novels

  • No Proud Chivalry (1947)
  • Each Man's Destiny (1947)
  • The End of the Street (1949)
  • Hurry the Darkness (1952)
  • Rich Is the Treasure (1952)
    aka Diamond Wizard
  • The Pub Crawler (1956)
  • Three at the Angel (1958)
  • The Spearhead Death (1960)
  • Devil in the Moonlight (1962)
  • The Dog Man (1969)

[edit] Series

Philip Hunter

  • The Chief Inspector's Statement (1951)
    aka The Pennycross Murders
  • I Will Speak Daggers (1956)
    aka The Ripper / Ripper Murders

Chief Inspector Martineau Investigates

  • Hell Is a City (1954)
    aka Somewhere in This City
  • The Midnight Plumber (1957)
  • Man in Ambush (1958)
  • Killer At Large (1959)
  • Devil's Due (1960)
  • The Devil Was Handsome (1961)
  • A Body to Spare (1962)
  • Moonlight Flitting (1963)
    aka The Graveyard Rolls
  • Two Men in Twenty (1964)
  • Death Has a Shadow (1965)
    aka Homicide Blonde
  • His Weight in Gold (1966)
  • Rogue Running (1966)
  • Exercise Hoodwink (1967)
  • Hideaway (1968)

[edit] Sources

[edit] External links


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