Hilton, John Buxton: Peak was scene of crimes

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Vivienne Smith plots the crime writing career of Buxton-born author and educationalist, John Buxton Hilton.

The Sunset Law book cover

The cover of the John Buxton Hilton educational book The Language Laboratory in School. Hilton was from Buxton

John Buxton Hilton’s detective Inspector Brunt investigates the goings-on at a Peak lead mine in the book Slickensides

SHROPSHIRE may have Brother Cadfael, and Oxford, Inspector Morse, but Derbyshire can also lay claim to its own fictional detectives thanks to the late John Buxton Hilton.

In the 1970s and 80s, he was a crime writer of considerable renown, with followings both in Britain and the United States.

Yet, perhaps the author’s greatest appeal lay in his home county where many of his novels were set.

Born in Buxton on June 8, 1921, the son of a local outfitter, John was named after his father, while Buxton was his mother’s maiden name.

Educated at the town’s grammar school, The College, he won a scholarship to Cambridge University.

But, just as he started his degree course in modern and medieval languages in 1939, the Second World War broke out.

Following graduation, Hilton enlisted in the Army and became a gunner in the Royal Artillery.

In July 1943, he took leave to marry his sweetheart, Mary Skitmore. The couple went on to have three daughters.

That same year, the 22-year-old joined the Intelligence Corps, his knowledge of French and German now being put to good use.

His work soon earned him a mention in dispatches.

One of his most harrowing duties was the interrogation of German officers at the concentration camps at the end of the conflict.

The young man found expression for his wartime experiences by writing poetry.

Five of his verses, all written in the last year of the war, were later published in the Everyman edition of Poems of the Second World War edited by Victor Selwyn.

They include the following stark lines, penned at Belsen in April 1945:

Cast in pits

And strewn with common lime;

Their fault that God ill-chose

Their place and time.

After the war, Hilton returned to England and set about training as a teacher. Over the next few years, he taught languages at schools in Huddersfield and Ramsgate.

By 1953, he was head of the languages department at King Edward VI School in Chelmsford, Essex.

After just over 10 years in the profession, he was appointed headmaster at Chorley Grammar School in Lancashire at the age of 36.

While there, Hilton developed one of the first language labs in the country, and certainly the first at a grammar school.

The educational merits of the pioneering venture were promoted in his book The Language Laboratory in School, published in 1964.

That same year, he resigned as head and became an Inspector for Schools, with special responsibilities for educational technology.

But already fiction writing was his favourite pastime.

As early as 1952, Hilton had won the Robert Scarth Award for his children’s story Potter’s About.

However, the first of his murder mysteries did not find a publisher until more than a decade later.

Death of an Alderman appeared in 1968 and featured Superintendent Simon Kenworthy of Scotland Yard, who was to be the hero of a further 16 books.

Meanwhile, difficult times lay ahead for the budding writer whose wife died the same year.

He remarried in May 1969, but soon afterwards was forced to take early retirement. A heart attack brought his successful career in education to an end at just 49.

Although now able to indulge his passion for writing whodunits, Hilton did not forsake teaching all together.

The Open University had just been founded and, throughout much of the 1970s, the author worked part-time as a course tutor in humanities.

On the dust jacket of his book Language Teaching: a systems approach (1973), he was acknowledged to be a charismatic lecturer.

Having settled in the village of Kenninghall, near Thetford, in Norfolk, Hilton pursued his new career as a novelist.

And he made regular trips back to his home county.

His formative years at Buxton were to provide plenty of inspiration for the murder mysteries.

As the author himself commented on his writing in 1984: “I suppose I am less interested in puzzles – and certainly less in violence – than in character, local colour, folklore, social history and historical influences, most of which loom large in most of my books.

“With these ingredients I try to write the sort of books that I wish I could find to read.”

He came up with three distinct detective series.

Following the success of the Superintendent Kenworthy books, which are contemporary police dramas, he introduced his Victorian sleuth Inspector Thomas Brunt in 1976.

Hilton’s third creation, Inspector Jack Mosley, first appeared in the early 1980s, the books being written under the pseudonym of John Greenwood.

Set in the Yorkshire Dales, they differ from his other works by being more humorous stories.

In Kenworthy, the author created a flippant and sometimes rather cynical character who is a shrewd operator, nevertheless.

With each succeeding novel, he moves up the ranks and ends up a chief superintendent before retiring to be a private investigator.

Although London-based, the detective pursues his investigations in the Peak on several occasions.

Hilton made good use of his local knowledge.

For instance, the plot of Some Run Crooked (1978) hinges on the real-life reputation of Peak Forest Chapel as Derbyshire’s own Gretna Green.

Many runaway couples have been married at the Church of King Charles the Martyr in the village, especially in the 18th century.

Thanks to a quirk of ecclesiastical law, weddings could take place without the banns being read, just as long as one of the couple was resident for 15 days prior to the ceremony.

In Hilton’s whodunit, it is the murder of social worker Julie Wimpole which brings Kenworthy and his sidekick, Sergeant Wright, to the village of Peak Low.

Her death appears to connect with two earlier ones, in 1940 and 1758. All three of the female victims had been intent on a quick marriage.

The writer based the earliest of these crimes on the famous 18th century murder of an eloping couple which occurred locally.

Unlike the Kenworthy mysteries, every one of Inspector Brunt’s cases are set in Derbyshire.

It has been said that only John Buxton Hilton could have written the book, for they reveal an intimate knowledge of the Peak which could only have resulted from a close association with the area.

The author brings the whole landscape alive in his use of dialect and the inclusion of local customs and traditions.

His re-creation of life amid the scattered villages and farms of late Victorian Derbyshire is particularly convincing.

As family feuds pass down from father to son, these isolated communities become natural breeding grounds for acts of violence.

For the patient and tenacious Inspector Brunt, it is all a matter of watching and waiting before the crime is solved.

The first of the mysteries to be published was Rescue from the Rose, which has a Buxton pub in the early 20th century as its setting.

The Cromford and High Peak Railway takes centre stage in Gamekeeper’s Gallows, in which the plot concerns a missing girl.

Two other Brunt whodunits, namely Dead-Nettle and Slickensides, are set among the lead mines of the White Peak.

Mr Fred is also located in this area. A disturbing tale about a child molester, it reveals, with chilling effect, how children working the family farm were once little more than slaves to their parents.

In The Quiet Stranger, published in 1985, Brunt recalls his days as a young constable in the 1870s.

The Times praised the book as an “atmospherically gripping historical chiller”.

This time Hilton made use of his knowledge of the infamous Litton Mill. Other places to get a mention in the story are Buxton, Bakewell, Darley Dale and even Derby police headquarters.

The quiet stranger of the title is George Ludlam. He suffered cruel beatings as a pauper apprentice at the mill in his youth before making his escape.

Following his return to the village, a nurse is hacked to death and he finds himself the prime suspect.

But, as in all good murder mysteries, the evidence is not as clear-cut as it seems.

At their best, Hilton’s crime novels could be richly inventive and found plenty of fans on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the words of the New York Times Book Review in October 1980: “The traditional British mystery lives on in John Buxton Hilton’s books.”

By 1986, he had written 29 whodunits. Not bad going for someone whose writing career had only begun in earnest a decade earlier.

But, sadly, that same year, on June 19, the author suddenly died soon after his 65th birthday.

Some 20 years on, his books are now out of print, although those published in the Collins Crime Club series can still be spotted on library shelves.

As one reviewer wrote in the Times Literary Supplement back in 1978: “The antiquarian byways of Derbyshire always bring out the best in John Buxton Hilton.”

That he effectively put his home county on the crime writing map of Britain remains the Buxton author’s legacy.

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