Iain Pears

Iain Pears was born in Coventry in 1955 and studied at Wadham College, Oxford, later completing a doctorate at Wolfson College. Before turning to fiction he reported for the BBC, Channel 4, ZDF and Reuters from Italy, France, Britain and the United States (1982 to 1990), and in 1987 he was a Getty Fellow at Yale. His art history book, The Discovery of Painting, deals with eighteenth-century British art.

He started with the Jonathan Argyll mysteries, which run from The Raphael Affair in 1990 to 2000 and follow an English art historian who keeps ending up alongside the Italian art-theft squad. Then he changed gears. His later novels are historical and built around a structural trick. An Instance of the Fingerpost gives four conflicting accounts of the murder of an Oxford don. The Dream of Scipio braids three stories set in Provence, in the fifth century, the age of the Black Death and the Second World War. Stone's Fall tells its three parts in reverse order. Arcadia, set partly in Cold War Oxford, also appeared in an electronic edition in which readers could move between its narrative strands.

An Instance of the Fingerpost, first published in 1997, made his name abroad and has been translated into several languages. The Dream of Scipio was named an ALA Notable Book in the United States.

Where to start? On WebToTell his name appears on Penguin's edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, where he supplied the introduction and Ed Glinert the notes; the stories are Conan Doyle's. To read Pears himself, begin with An Instance of the Fingerpost, his best-known novel. If you want something lighter and quicker, pick up The Raphael Affair.