Lionel Davidson Books in Order

Lionel Davidson was born in Hull, Yorkshire, on March 31, 1922, the youngest of nine children in a Polish-Jewish immigrant family. His father, a tailor and trade union organizer, died when Lionel was still very young, and the family moved to London, where he grew up. His mother had come from Vilnius, and one of the small, telling details from Davidson's life is that he later taught her to read and write.

He left school at 15 and started work as an office boy at The Spectator. He published a short story there while still a teenager, then moved into writing children's magazine pieces and photo captions for Keystone Press. He did not come through universities or literary circles. He learned by working, watching, and writing to deadline.

Then came the war.

During the Second World War he served as a wireless operator in the Royal Navy's submarine service. Afterward he returned to press work and traveled around Europe as a reporter and freelancer. One of those trips gave him the spark for The Night of Wenceslas, his first novel, a Cold War story that sends an ordinary young man into a Prague trip gone badly wrong.

That book arrived in 1960 and won both the Gold Dagger and the Author's Club First Novel Award. Davidson followed it with The Rose of Tibet, which takes a London schoolteacher into Tibet during the Chinese invasion, and then with A Long Way to Shiloh, a witty, dangerous hunt for the lost Menorah that won him a second Gold Dagger. Readers often come to Davidson for the suspense, but they stay for the odd details, the humor, and the way his places feel fully lived in.

He liked throwing outsiders into trouble.

His middle period widened the map. Davidson lived in Israel for much of the period between 1968 and 1978, and books such as Making Good Again, Smith's Gazelle, and The Sun Chemist brought Jewish history, restitution, science, and the politics of the region into his thrillers without turning them into lectures. Even when the plots get elaborate, the people in them usually feel a little rumpled, a little fallible, and very human.

He also wrote for younger readers under the name David Line. That side of his work includes Under Plum Lake, a strange, memorable children's novel about a hidden world beneath the sea. Later he published The Chelsea Murders, which won him a third Gold Dagger, and after a long gap returned with Kolymsky Heights in 1994, a huge Siberian thriller that reminded readers how much nerve and craft he still had in reserve.

Davidson never wrote a huge shelf of books. He wrote slowly, disappeared for long stretches, and left a fairly small body of adult fiction. But the range inside that shelf is striking: Prague under the Cold War, Tibet in upheaval, desert treasure hunts, postwar Germany, London murder, and frozen Siberia. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger in 2001.

He died in London on October 21, 2009. By then he had become one of those writers other writers quietly press on people they like, not because he was flashy, but because once his books click, they tend to stick.