Chichester crime writer Peter Lovesey is honoured

The club was founded in 1930; Peter was himself, as he says, founded in 1936.

The book, Motives for Murder, was edited by Martin Edwards and comes with a foreword by Len Deighton. It is published in the UK by Sphere.

Past presidents of the club include G K Chesterton, Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie, Julian Symons, H R F Keating and Simon Brett, who lives just outside Arundel.

“Membership is by invitation and I joined in the same year (1974) as Dame Ngaio Marsh and John Le Carre,” Peter says.

“The club has an initiation ceremony, a bit of nonsense in which the new member joins a candlelit procession to appear before the president and place a hand on Eric the Skull – a real skull with eyes that light up.

“No identical twins, poisons unknown to science, feminine intuition, ghosts and so on. Apart from producing the occasional book, the club is purely social and meets twice a year at the Garrick Club and once at the Dorchester.”

In the book, the stories include Dreaming of Rain and Peter Lovesey by Ann Cleeves, the writer of the Vera series on TV, and A Sonnet for Peter Lovesey by Simon Brett.

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