About John Harvey

John Harvey (born 21 December 1938 in London) is a British author of crime fiction most famous for his series of jazz-influenced Charlie Resnick novels, based in the City of Nottingham.

Harvey has published over 100 books under various names, and has worked on scripts for TV and radio. He started writing in the 1970s when he produced a variety of pulp fiction including westerns. He also ran Slow Dancer Press from 1977 to 1999 publishing poetry. His own poetry has been published in a number of chapbooks and two collections, "Ghosts of a Chance" and "Bluer Than This", published by Smith/Doorstop. In 2014 Smith/Doorstop published a New & Selected Poems, "Out of Silence".

The first Resnick novel, Lonely Hearts, was published in 1989, and was named by The Times as one of the 100 Greatest Crime Novels of the Century. Harvey brought the series to an end in 2014 with Darkness, Darkness, which he dramatised for the stage and which was produced at Nottingham Playhouse in 2014.

The next series from Harvey was the Frank Elder series. The first novel in that series, Flesh and Blood, won Harvey the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger in 2004, an accolade many crime fiction critics[who?] thought long overdue. In 2007 he was awarded the Diamond Dagger for a Lifetime's Contribution to the genre.