雇われ署長―署長ベネット

by Ted Wood

Paperback Shinsho

About the author

Born Edward John Wood in Shoreham, Sussex, England, he lived in London until the outbreak of the Second World War. Enforced relocation to rural Worcestershire, which left him with a lifelong love of the countryside, was followed by service in RAF Coastal Command. In 1954 he immigrated to Canada, where he was a policeman in Toronto for three years. In 1957 he joined MacLaren Advertising as a copywriter, eventually becoming a creative director. He now lives in Whitby, Ontario.

While employment in law enforcement and advertising provided food and shelter for his growing family, Wood found time to write and sell short stories to Canadian and American magazines and to write television plays; he also collaborated on the musical comedy Mister Scrooge, which was produced in Toronto and on cbc television. In 1974 he published a collection of Chekhovian short stories, Somebody Else's Summer.

His Dead in the Water (1984) won the Scribner's Crime Novel Award, and publication in the USA and Canada. The book featured a small-town policeman, Reid Bennett, and his dog Sam—the entire law enforcement needs of Murphy's Harbour, a fictional resort community in the Muskoka region of Ontario. Bennett's and Sam's popularity was enough to extend the series though Murder on Ice (1984) to its current tenth title, A Clean Kill (1995), and to have the books also published in England and in many translations. A second series featuring a peripatetic Toronto-based bodyguard, John Locke, has thus far extended to three titles: Hammerlocke (1986), Lockestep (1987) and Timelocke (1991).

Source: Ted Wood Biography - (b. 1931), Mister Scrooge, Somebody else's summer, Dead in the water

Librarian Note: The John Locke series is published under the pseudonym Jack Barnao.