Joan Lock

Sub-genre: Action, Biography, gangster, Historical, Humour, Medical, mystery, Procedural, suspense, True Crime

Joan Lock’s first book, Lady Policeman, described her six years as a policewoman in London’s West End during the 1950s. The next, Reluctant Nightingale, her previous training as a nurse. Nine non-fiction, police/crime books followed including three on Scotland Yard’s First Detectives and a history (the first) of the British Women Police – a subject on which she is an authority. She supported women police during their difficult integration period of the 1970s-90s with features in the police press and on radio and advised on and appeared in BBC4’s 90-minute TV documentary, A Fair Cop, in 2015.

Joan has also written short stories, radio plays and documentaries. Her crime fiction includes one modern novel, Death in Perspective, and, beginning with Dead Image, seven Victorian novels featuring the charismatic Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Earnest Best. Another major non-fiction work, The Princess Alice Disaster, was published in 2013

She has served twice on the CWA Committee, is past Chair of their Non-Fiction Awards Panel and for ten years contributed Locklines, a page on police matters, to their journal, Red Herrings,for which she received two awards.

What made her write her latest book – contrast.

 

• Website

Other Awards

A Red Herring and a Leo Harris Award for Outstanding contributions to Red Herrings, the Journal of the Crime Writers Association.

Her latest book, Pistols,Bombs and Motor Bandits – The Real Golden Age of Murder,  was inspired by the recent renewed attention to The Golden Years of Murder which straddled the Twenties and Thirties when detective novels were all the rage. In some, murder took place in country houses, was solved by aristocrats not the idiot police and were much appreciated by readers for their puzzles and the contrast to the horrors of the Great War.

Of course real life told a different story. Firearms left over from the war and men accustomed to using them saw them playing a part even in domestic murders and police officers could be shot when even tackling minor crimes. Motor Bandits                    ran riot committing bank raids and other crimes unhindered by police who had no such vehicles. The IRA were only intermittently active but had much more to come and the Communist Party of Great Britain were busy advising members of the public how to take over the State. Surplus women were now in great danger from men allowed a licence to kill by the mainly male juries who refused to find them guilty of murder – or of  anything – until a judge began to notice . . .   Her book intertwines the progress of the newest British detective novelists with dramatic reality tales.

Books by Joan Lock

• Marlborough Street; The Story of a London Court

  

• SCOTLAND YARD CASEBOOK: The Making of the CID 1865-1935

  

• Lady Policeman

  

• Death in Perspective

  

• Please, Nurse!

  

• Seis Rosas Blancas

  

• Famous Trials, Famous Prisons and Protecting Yourself Against Criminals

  

• Tales from Bow Street
• The British Policewoman: Her Story 2nd Edition
• BLUE MURDER?
• Dreadful Deeds and Awful Murders: Scotland Yard’s First Detectives 1829-1878
• Reluctant Nightingale

  

• Scotland Yard’s First Cases

  

• The Princess Alice Disaster

  

• Dead Fall

  

• Dead Centre

  

• The British Policewoman: Her Story

  

• Dead Loss

  

• Dead Image

  

• Dead Born

  

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