John Coffin Series The leading detective in the first three stories was an Inspector Winter. He appeared too in the fourth story ‘The Dull Dead’ (1958) but by this time the young John Coffin (described as “mercurial”) had made his first appearance, and it was with Coffin that Gwendoline Butler continued.
There was a quantum leap for John Coffin, in 1989. Starting with the book ‘Coffin in the Black Museum’ his creator took him from south London across the Thames and planted him in east London, in an imaginary district that was obviously based on Docklands.
There are total of 34 books in the John Coffin Series.
"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!"
Shakespeare, King Lear (Edmund) Act I, scene ii
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