Peter Walker, best-selling author and former policeman

The death at 80 of Peter Walker, a North Yorkshire village policeman who became one of the north's most prolific writers, brought to a close a remarkable publishing franchise.
Peter Walker in the village of Oswaldkirk, the inspiration for his Heartbeat novels.
 Picture: Gerard BinksPeter Walker in the village of Oswaldkirk, the inspiration for his Heartbeat novels.
 Picture: Gerard Binks
Peter Walker in the village of Oswaldkirk, the inspiration for his Heartbeat novels. Picture: Gerard Binks

He was not just one author but a veritable bookshelf full of them, answering to Nicholas Rhea, Christopher Coram, James Ferguson, Tom Ferris and Andrew Arncliffe.

Explaining the reasons for his multiple personalities, he said his publisher had set a limit of two books a year from the same writer. With three names, he could triple his output.

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Nicholas Rhea - the surname was that of his grandfather - was the one he chose for his series of Country Constable novels about a village bobby he fashioned after himself.

“I used to read crime novels and it dawned on me that they always featured high profile officers - chief inspectors and superintendents, and of course it was totally unrealistic,” he mused in 2007.

“The bobby is the man who does most of the work in the police force - so having been one, I thought I’d write about that. And I wouldn’t glamorise it - I’d write the stories as they happened.”

His first such work, with no thought to a sequel, was called Constable on the Hill. To his surprise, the Sunday Express and Reader’s Digest began serialising it, a paperback reprint was ordered and a franchise born.

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But it was the television adaptation, renamed Heartbeat, that embedded it in the public mind. Yorkshire Television had optioned the TV rights back in the eighties, but it was not until 1992 that the series made it to air, with the popular soap actor Nick Berry in the title role of PC Nick Rowan, a London PC who had come north for a life of bucolic crime fighting.

The show’s early 1960s setting and its soundtrack of popular music made it an instant success, and it endured, with various changes of cast and character, for 18 seasons.

With so many episodes, Heartbeat soon ran out of Nicholas Rhea’s original material, but Mr Walker stayed close
to the show and read every new script its team of writers turned out.

All were set in the North York Moors he loved. “When I first started to write, most of the books I read never mentioned my part of Yorkshire - the Moors as opposed to the Dales,” he said.

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Moors folk were different to Dalesmen and women, be believed. They had in the Moors “an inbred sense of humour which they don’t appreciate they’ve got,” he said.

“The older Yorkshire people are true characters - they’re very determined in what they’ll do. They don’t listen to anyone else’s opinions. They don’t go very far outside the area, so they never see what the other parts of the world have to offer. It’s a very distinctive behaviour.”

Although his work took him far from the Moors, his roots stayed there. He had been born and raised, the son of an insurance agent and a teacher, in the village of Glaisdale, inland from Whitby. The oldest of three children, he won a scholarship to Whitby Grammar but left at 16 to become a police cadet. In 1956, he joined the North Yorkshire force as a
beat bobby in Whitby. At the time of his retirement in 1982, after 30 years’ service, he was an inspector, working out
of the press office in Northallerton.

He had written 13 books before his first publication, in 1967. “They were absolute rubbish, of course,” he recalled.

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His output was by no means confined to the Country Constable series, and he was for many years a leading light in the northern chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association.

Its chairman, the author Martin Edwards, noted that no matter how profitable the Heartbeat franchise, its success never changed him.

“He was a kind, generous, down-to-earth man, who took Heartbeat’s success in his stride,” he said.

Gill Jackson, his editor at the publisher Robert Hale, concurred. “As an author, he was ideal: undemanding, always interested and kind to each member of staff he came across,” she said. “His sheer good nature brought out the best in us all – we were more than happy to accommodate anything he wanted.”

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Mr Walker and his wife, Rhoda, had lived for 50 years in the Moors village of Ampleforth, whose abbey had been the inspiration for some of his stories.

He died at St Leonard’s Hospice in York, having suffered a recurrence of the cancer that had been diagnosed 10 years earlier.

He is survived by Rhoda, their four children and eight grandchildren. The funeral took place yesterday at Our Lady’s and St Benedict’s RC Church, Ampleforth.

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