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ACKROYD, Peter

British writer (born 1949)

Ackroyd is a biographer as well as a novelist -- his Dickens is 1200 pages long, sumptuously detailed, and acclaimed -- and his fiction benefits from a researcher's eye for extraordinary and revealing detail about the past. Often, he blends a modern story with a historical one, and characters from the past move in and out of the contemporary narrative like ghosts. He sets many stories in London (he is the author of London: A Biography), and superbly evokes its people and atmosphere, both today and in different periods of the past.

HAWKSMOOR  (1985) This remains the most exhilarating and adventurous of Ackroyd’s explorations of a London in which past and present endlessly intertwine. A contemporary detective (the namesake of the seventeenth-century architect) is driven towards a mystical encounter with forces from the past through his investigations of a series of murders in London churches. Part of the narrative is written in a prose which demonstrates Ackroyd’s chameleon-like ability to mimic the English of past centuries and its rhythms.

THE HOUSE OF DOCTOR DEE  (1993) Matthew Palmer, a contemporary 29-year-old, inherits an old London house which once belonged to (the real) John Dee, a scientist and alchemist of the time of Elizabeth I whose life's obsession was to create a 'homunculus' (a kind of cross between test-tube baby and devil). Each chapter of the book alternates between the modern story and Dee's own narrative, and the links are first, the house and its Clerkenwell setting, and second, the fact that homunculi were believed to live for thirty years, and then to disappear and be reincarnated -- so that the overriding question is, 'What is Matthew's real identity?' The modern story is an engrossing combination of mystery and ghost-story, and Dee's narrative, told in a resounding pastiche of Elizabethan English, catches both the social life and manners of the age, and the obsession of a 'scientist' whose work leads him to flirt with the occult.

Ackroyd's other novels include: Chatterton (about the 18th-century literary forger who committed suicide at the age of 17), The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and English Music. He has also written poetry, prize-winning biographies of T.S. Eliot, William Blake and Shakespeare and, in addition to his London ‘biography’, Albion, a characteristically idiosyncratic investigation of the English imagination.

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Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (blending the stories of the real Dan Leno, 'the funniest man in England' in 19th-century music-hall, such literary figures as George Gissing and Karl Marx, and the mysterious serial killer of the 1890s nicknamed the 'Linehouse Golem')

The Lambs of London (n which he provides his own fictional version of the lives of Charles and Mary Lamb)

To Hawksmoor : David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost; Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

To The House of Doctor Dee : Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

To Ackroyd's work in general : Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (first novel in the 'Cornish' trilogy) E.L. Doctorow, Waterworks Rose Tremain, Restoration Michael Moorcock, Mother London Iain Sinclair, Downriver

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