Peter N. Walker Books In Order

Publication Order of Carnaby Books

Publication Order of Detective Superintendent Mark Pemberton Books

Publication Order of Panda One Books

Publication Order of Ross MacAllister Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Maddleskirk Abbey Books

Publication Order of The Constable Files Books

Publication Order of Assured Books

Publication Order of Montague Pluke Books

Publication Order of Emmerdale Farm Books

Publication Order of Constable Nick Mystery Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Peter N Walker
Peter Norman Walker, born May 18, 1936, is a former policeman and born in Glaisdale, North Yorkshire. He was born to a teacher and an insurance agent, and was the oldest of three kids. He won a scholarship to Whitby Grammar School, however left at the age of sixteen.

He also published under the pen names of Tom Ferris, Andrew Arncliffe, James Ferguson, Nicholas Rhea, and Christopher Coram.

Peter believed writing was something he always intended on doing. He was still in school, and he went to church. Peter saw an old gentleman in the seat ahead of him and he asked his mom who the man was. She told him it was Major Fairfax-Blakeborough, and he was an author. It got young Peter curious as to what an author did. She told him that he wrote papers, books, and things. Later on, he looked in a weekly paper, the Whitby Gazette, and the man had a piece in there.

Jumping ahead, Peter ended up inheriting the man’s column, and he thinks that guy might have been the person that started him on his way.

When Peter was sixteen, he joined the Yorkshire Police as a cadet. He had a long career in law enforcement that enabled him to rise in rank. Going from constable to sergeant, then on to inspector. Before he retired in early 1983, he became an officer in charge of press relations. He retired from the force in order to write seriously.

In the year 1964, he decided to write in his spare time after years of casual interest. He had his first short story published in the Police Review. In 1967, the first of his “Carnaby” novels, called “Carnaby and the Hijackers”, was released by Hale. This novel came after producing many unsuccessful novels of different genres. It was a complicated tale but it establishes Carnaby as a series character and his publishers asked him for further novels.

He wrote a total of eleven novels starring this character, a Detective Sergeant with New Scotland Yard. Peter said that the reason he stopped writing them was not because he had no desire to, rather it was because Robert Hale quit publishing crime novels.

Peter also published the “Panda One” novels under his own name. The series had four novels, published from 1971 until the year 1981.

Peter found that his favorite novel of his own novels was “Carnaby and the Hijackers”, if only because it was his first published novel.

In each of the novels he wrote, he drew on his experiences in the police force, his continued interest in crime fact and fiction, and his ceaseless enthusiasm for Yorkshire.

He set a lot of his stories in Yorkshire since he knew it so well. When he began writing the Constable books, he put some of himself into them and used some experiences he remembered with some police stories that happened to others.

Peter got his ideas from all around him. Everything he did, and everywhere he went, all that he saw gave him potential material. He would hear a bit of conversation in the pub, at the bus stop, or in a shop and it could trigger something. His ideas would queue up on him.

He found it easy enough to just down with a blank page and get going. He worked office hours, since this was his business. His wife worked as his personal assistant, looking after all the accounts and the phone calls and such, which left him free to write.

His day wasn’t just made up of writing though. Sometimes he would be checking proofs, or Heartbeat scripts. Actual writing took him twelve hours a week, from Monday to Wednesday, when he would get around fifteen thousand words out. Then on Thursdays he would do columns for two of his local newspapers. Switching from fact to fiction wasn’t any trouble for him.

For his Montague Pluke character, he wanted to create a detective that was the total opposite of what people might expect him to be. So Peter made him very superstitious and he wanted Montague to have a country flavor and made him an expert on horse troughs.

Then he had to figure out what the guy would wear. One day he was on York Station and a guy came and stood right in front of him. The man wore a long yellow and pink overcoat that went down to his ankles. The guy’s pants were the same color, and he wore pink socks, spats and brogue shoes, thick glasses, and this blue Panama hat. Peter knew that this is how his detective should look.

For the books with Matthew Taylor, a 1950s butcher-turned-insurance salesman, who covers the isolated hamlets and farms of Delversdale, he moved away from the force. They are based in the same locality, in the North York Moors, that uses a young guy, which was in fact based off of Peter’s dad. Peter pinched his dad’s tales and fictionalized each of them.

Peter is probably best known for writing his “Constable” series, which he published under his Nicholas Rhea pen name. This series was adapted into the television series called “Heartbeat”, which Peter served as a police consultant on.

The name Nicholas Rhea came when he was still a serving police officer. He got the opportunity to pen a weekly countryman’s diary and he thought he should have a pen name. So he used his grandpa’s last name, Rhea and took the name Nicholas from a local saint from where he comes from, Nicholas Postgate. When he began writing about a country policeman he used this country name.

Besides writing fiction, he has also published essays and works of criminology, under various names. This includes his Country Diary that he worked on and published each day for forty years.

In the year 2008, he was presented a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Yorkshire Rural Awards. He was honored with the award in recognition of his years of dedication and hard work to his craft.

With Rhoda, his wife, he had four kids: Andrew, Janet, Sarah, and Tricia.

He died April 21, 2017 at the age of eighty of cancer.