John Creasey: Ten Authors in One | The First of Many | Simple Facts | The Toff
Gideon of the Yard (as JJ Marric) | Department Z | Dr Palfrey
Patrick Dawlish (as Gordon Ashe) | As Jeremy York | Inspector West
Michael Fane and Dr Cellini | The Baron

In 1938 John Creasey lived in a village called Ashe, Hampshire, England. There he created Patrick Dawlish and his pseudonym of Gordon Ashe.

Dawlish was shown as a huge man with a group of hearty, hard-hitting friends, based on the 'Bulldog Drummond' tradition. Drawn by chance into a vicious series of crimes, he decided to solve them himself - thus bringing himself into sharp conflict with the law, represented by the then Chief Inspector Wllliam Trivett. Luckily, Trivett had much more sympathy than most policemen would have had with this tremendous personality, realising that his 'hunches' were really a logical development of ideas, linked together with bewildering speed.

Soon, the war brought a new challenge, and Patrick Dawlish became a powerful and far-famed figure in M15 - Britain's Intelligence Corps. Time after time he dropped into occupied Europe, organising resistance against the hated Nazis. Time after time he spirited prisoners across the English Channel, gaining world-wide renown as a modern Scarlet Pimpernel¹. It was during these dangerous, desperate, war-time days that he met and married Felicity; and Trivett (now Superintendent) was able to help him officially in many of his exploits.

The end of the war sent Dawlish into enforced retirement, with his beloved Felicity, and he endeavoured to settle down to the peaceful life of the English countryside, rearing pigs and fowl and growing apples. He no longer went looking for trouble. But trouble sought him out, and gradually he became a kind of unpaid private eye. Often he found himself in conflict with the police; even with Trivett. Felicity had little patience with these anti-crime activities, but eventually, as did Trivett, she came to the conclusion that this was the life Dawlish both loved and needed. Hating crime, he instinctively wanted to help anyone in danger or in trouble.

Out of the blue, he was offered the post of Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Crime at Scotland Yard, his special task being to fight any crime which crossed national and continental borders. Soon he became Britain's delegate to a world police convention which was in constant session, and it was not long before the world came to know these dedicated fighters against crime as the Crime Haters. As with the Dr Cellini books by Michael Halliday, the Crime Haters series gives to a very early John Creasey pseudonym new quality and maturity, so that both the author and his character have reached higher peaks. Yet the early books have a tremendous vitality, which easily enables them to stand comparison.

The Crime Hater series

* Changed for paperback reprint in England to The Snatch.

Where no date is given, US publication is likely by Holt, Rinehart and Winston after John Creasey's revision.