Кит Майлз: Жизнь и творчество валлийского писателя

Welsh writer

Keith Miles (born 1940) is a Welsh writer of historical fiction and mystery novels. He has also written children's books, radio and television dramas and stage plays. He is best known under the pseudonym Edward Marston, and has also written as Martin Inigo and Conrad Allen.

Miles was born and educated in South Wales. He gained a degree in Modern History from Oxford University and spent three years as a lecturer, before becoming a full time writer. Miles's early work was as a scriptwriter for television and radio, including series such as Crossroads, Z Cars and The Archers. Miles was chairman of the Crime Writers' Association for 1997–98. He was previously married to Rosalind Miles and is now married to another mystery writer, Judith Cutler. He has written two mysteries set in the United States which feature a Welsh architect, Merlin Richards. The Action Scene series included five books, from Skydive to Frontier; as Miles, he also wrote Not for Glory, Not for Gold, a novel about athletics. The City Hospital series included ten books, starting with New Blood (1995) and ending with Heart Rate (1996).

In 1988, Miles began a series set in the theatrical world of Elizabethan London. For this series, and for most of his subsequent writing, he adopted the pseudonym Edward Marston, the name reflecting that of a real Elizabethan playwright, John Marston. The series features a fictional theatrical company, Westfield's Men, and, in particular, Nicholas Bracewell, its book holder, a position similar to that of the modern stage manager. His next series as Marston was set during the reign of William the Conqueror; its two main characters, surveyors for Domesday Book, are Ralph Delchard, a Norman soldier, and Gervase Bret, a former novice turned lawyer, who is half Saxon and half Breton. Marston began his Restoration series in 1999 featuring architect/detective Christopher Redmayne and the puritan Constable Jonathan Bale. Six books were written in this series, with the last one, The Painted Lady, released in 2007. In the "Captain Rawson" series, Marston has written about a soldier and spy operating during the military campaigns of the Duke of Marlborough. In recent years, he began the "Home Front Detective Series", set in London during the First World War; seven had been published as of 2019. His "Bow Street Rivals" series, set in London during the Napoleonic Wars, includes five books as of 2020. Marston has been most prolific in his "Railway Detective" series, published by Allison & Busby. This is set in the middle of the 19th century against the background of the "Railway Age". It concerns two Scotland Yard detectives, Inspector Robert Colbeck and Sergeant Victor Leeming, whose cases are invariably linked to the railways. Colbeck is a former barrister who is enthralled by the railways and marries a railwayman's daughter. Leeming, in contrast, detests travelling by train and yearns for the days of horse drawn transport. Beginning with The Railway Detective itself in 2004, there were 20 titles in this series to the end of 2021.

Miles has used three other pseudonyms: Martin Inigo, Conrad Allen and David Garland. As Allen, he wrote about the private detectives George Porter Dillman and Genevieve Masefield, who operated aboard ocean liners of the early 20th century. There were eight books in this series, starting with Murder on the Lusitania (1999) and concluding with Murder on the Celtic (2007). As Garland he wrote novels about the American Revolutionary War, Saratoga and Valley Forge. He used the pseudonym Christopher Mountjoy for three books in the 1980s, Coming of Age, Queen and Country and The Honourable Member.