Martin Edwards

Kenneth Martin Edwards (born 7 July 1955) is a British crime novelist, whose work has won multiple awards including lifetime achievement awards for his fiction, non-fiction, short fiction, and scholarship in the UK and the United States.

In addition to translations into various European languages, his books have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese.

As a crime fiction critic and historian, and also in his career as a solicitor, he has written non-fiction books and many articles.

Martin Edwards was born in Knutsford and educated in Cheshire (at Sir John Deane's Grammar School, where one of his teachers was Robert Westall, who later became a successful children's author) and at Balliol College, where he took a first-class honours degree in jurisprudence in 1977.

He qualified as a solicitor in 1980 and joined the firm of Mace & Jones, where he became a partner in 1984, and head of employment law in 1990, becoming chair of the employment law practice in 2011, when the firm merged with Weightmans LLP.

After spending three years with Weightmans as a partner, he is now a consultant.

In 1988, he married Helena Shanks and they have two children, Jonathan and Catherine.

He is well-known for his expertise on crime fiction and in other fields.

He has taken part in Criminal Mastermind at two Bouchercon conventions, in 1990 and 1995, and at two CrimeFest conventions, in 2009 and 2010, winning on three occasions and finishing as runner-up once.

In 2022, he captained the Balliol College team which became series champions in Christmas University Challenge 2022, the final series hosted by Jeremy Paxman.

His first novel, All the Lonely People, introduced Liverpool lawyer Harry Devlin and was published in 1991, earning a nomination for the John Creasey Memorial Dagger for best first crime novel of the year.

Edwards has written over 80 short stories, which have appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, and he has edited the Crime Writers' Association's annual crime anthology since 1996.

His early stories were collected in ''Where Do You Find Your Ideas?

and other stories'', which had an introduction by Reginald Hill.

The Coffin Trail was the first of eight books set in the Lake District (The Lake District Mysteries) featuring Detective Chief Inspector Hannah Scarlett and historian Daniel Kind; it was short-listed for the Theakston's Old Peculier Award for best crime novel of 2006.

In 2007, Edwards was appointed Archivist of the Crime Writers' Association, and in 2011 the CWA gave him a Red Herring Award in recognition of his services to the Association.

The Arsenic Labyrinth was short-listed for the Lakeland Book of the Year Award in 2008.

Edwards has also written a stand-alone novel of psychological suspense, Take My Breath Away, and completed The Lazarus Widow by the late Bill Knox.

2008 also saw the publication of his first historical novel, Dancing for the Hangman, a fictional account of the life and misadventures of Hawley Harvey Crippen.

Writing in Historical Noir, Barry Forshaw said it was “a book to make readers wish that the versatile Edwards might tackle the historical crime genre more often.”

Edwards won the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2008 with 'The Bookbinder's Apprentice' and has also been shortlisted three times for the same Dagger with 'Test Drive', 'Murder and its Motives' and 'Strangers in a Pub' in 2005, 2017, and 2019 respectively.

In 2008, he was elected to membership of The Detection Club and in 2011 he was appointed its first archivist.

In 2012 the book was republished by Arcturus in its series of Crime Classics, while Yesterday's Papers was reissued as an Arcturus Crime Classic in 2013.

To date, Edwards has written eight novels about Devlin; the most recent is Waterloo Sunset.

In 2012, new ebook and print editions of the early Harry Devlin novels were published, including introductions by writers such as Val McDermid, Peter Lovesey, Andrew Taylor and Frances Fyfield.

In her foreword to All the Lonely People, Fyfield said: "What distinguishes this book and those that follow and what makes them classics of a kind is this marvellous quality of compassion and the celebration of all that is heroic in the corrupted ordinary."

In 2014, he was the inaugural winner of the CWA Margery Allingham Prize for his story 'Acknowledgments.' In 2021 he was commissioned by Mysterious Bookshop of New York City to contribute to a series of limited edition Bibliomysteries; the result was The Traitor.

In 2023, he received a further commission to write a Christmas story, ‘End Game’, for customers of the Mysterious Bookshop.

In the same year, he became the second British writer, after Ruth Rendell, to be awarded the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award by the Short Mystery Fiction Society, in recognition of his lifetime achievement in the field of the short story.

He became Vice Chair of the CWA in 2015 and became Chair of the CWA in 2017.

Four years later in 2015, he became the eighth president of the club, succeeding Simon Brett.

He is the only person to have held the offices of President of the Detection Club and Chair of the CWA at the same time.

“Martin Edwards has earned distinction in every area of the crime-fiction field", said Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in July 2016. Four years later, the Crime Writers’ Association named him as the recipient of the Diamond Dagger in recognition of the sustained excellence of his work coupled with his significant contribution to crime writing published in the English language, and Ian Rankin said ‘His novels feature an acute sense of place as well as deep psychological insights.’ His latest novel is Sepulchre Street. Like Gallows Court, Mortmain Hall and Blackstone Fell, the story features Rachel Savernake and is set in the early 1930s. Lee Child described Gallows Court as ‘Superb... the book Edwards was born to write’, and in 2019 the novel was longlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger and shortlisted for the eDunnit award for best hardback and ebook novel of the year.

In December 2023, Martin Edwards was voted Best Newcomer for the Japanese translation of Gallows Court by a panel of 51 experts for Hayakawa Mystery Magazine.

Blackstone Fell was longlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger in 2023.

He served as Chair of the CWA from January 2017 to April 2019, making him the longest-serving Chair since the CWA's founder, John Creasey.

There has been increasing critical interest in and appreciation of Edwards' work, and his skill in marrying people and places with plot.

In 2018, Edwards won the CWA Dagger in the Library, which recognises “a body of work by a crime writer that users of libraries particularly admire”.

He was a founder member of the Northern Chapter of the Crime Writers' Association and of the Murder Squad collective of crime writers.

He is the current President of the Detection Club and in 2020 was awarded the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger, the highest honour in British crime writing, in recognition of the "sustained excellence" of his work in the genre.