Der englische Krimi, nicht zuletzt in seiner "klassischen Landhaus"-Variante (wo es nicht um das Genre als Ersatz für progressivistische Belehrung des Lesers geht, sondern um ein realitätsenthobenes Gedankenpuzzle), hat immer von herrlich verschrobenen Charaktereren & Schauplätzen gelebt. Gleiches gilt für die Jugendliteratur. Eine Voraussetzung für das Gelingen solcher Texte ist, daß aus aller Skurrilität & unbändiger Freude an der Erfindung & dem Spiel kein Abgleiten in die Beliebigkeit resultiert & die Charaktere mit zu bloßen Schemen oder Karikaturen werden (in diesem Fall geht ein solcher Texts ins Fach der Burleske oder zum Slapstick über). PD, der vorgestern an seinem 88. Geburtstag gestorben ist, hat es in seinem Werk verstanden, diese Balance zu beiden Seiten hin & in beiden Sparten zu meistern.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituari...r-obituary.html

Zitat von Telegraph

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Writing in the Independent, Peter Langdown observed that a poll to find Britain’s greatest living children’s author would be tediously predictable: “Potter trumps all”. “But what would happen if you brought criteria other than immediate popularity into the picture – awarding points for originality, intelligence, clarity of style, emotional depth, and sheer range? There is not much doubt, in my mind, that the winner would be Peter Dickinson.”

Dickinson had an unusual gift for putting himself into the shoes of his youthful protagonists – imagining how it feels to be a missionary’s son, orphaned in the Boxer Rebellion and lost in the mountains of Tibet (Tulku, 1979); describing what it would be like to be a 13-year-old girl in an over-populated future dystopia, whose memory has been transplanted to the brain of a chimp (Eva, 1989); portraying the life of a child guerrilla in a fictional African country (AK, 1990) or a Byzantine slave boy, fleeing rampaging Huns in the company of a tame bear (The Dancing Bear, 1972). “It is not part of fiction’s job to tell the reader what to think,” he explained. “But it can be fiction’s job to show the reader how it feels, because that can only be done through the imagination.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/arts/p...at-88.html?_r=0

Zitat von New York Times

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Mr. Dickinson’s appetite for arcane knowledge and his taste for unusual situations, often those from the past, made him a highly unpredictable genre writer.

In “The Poison Oracle” (1974), the palace zookeeper in a mythical Middle Eastern kingdom must draw on his language work with chimpanzees to solve a crime. In two comic mysteries, “King and Joker” (1976) and “Skeleton-in-Waiting” (1989), Mr. Dickinson invented a Britain ruled by a democratized royal family. In “Some Deaths Before Dying” (1999), a 90-year-old sleuth must solve a crime whose principal players are dead, near dead or suffering from dementia.

“Dickinson is one of the most natural and literate of mystery writers,” Harold Schonberg, under the pen name Newgate Callendar, wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1972. “His people talk as people really talk; they have understandable motivations; and each person emerges as a believable character in his own right.”

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