On the making of Robinson’s stylistic ‘fast ones’ through the Banks’ series early years

This paper is one of a series investigating clue-burying and misdirection (re)strategising through an examination of Leeds University special collection archive material pertaining to Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks crime novels, material inclusive of annotated early novel drafts, notebooks, and correspondence with editors/early readers (1987–2018). Though the earlier academic series papers separately identified stylistic strategies employed in three specific Inspector Banks novels, what the present paper does is instead identify the strategies Robinson has come to favour through the years, with reference to previously analysed but also newly explored books from this large set of 25 novels.