Crime writer whose zestful detective stories had a satirical streak
Although his fiction was better known and more widely appreciated in the US, Robert Barnard, who has died aged 76, was one of the leading exponents of the traditional English murder mystery, firmly in the cosy school of crime writing. It was a term he never denied or disparaged as he felt strongly that the goal of the crime writer was simply to entertain. In this he tried to emulate Agatha Christie, about whom he wrote a critical study, A Talent to Deceive (1980). Her writing, he said, had "probably given more sheer pleasure than any other in this century". He was no doubt proud of the fact that, for a brief period, he shared an editor with Christie in Elizabeth Walter, of the Collins Crime Club.
Barnard was born in Brightlingsea, Essex, and educated at Colchester Royal grammar school before reading English at Balliol College, Oxford. He worked briefly for the Fabian Society and as a lecturer at a technical college in Accrington before decamping for Australia in 1961 to take up a lectureship at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales.
During his six years in Australia he met and married Louise, his wife for almost 50 years, and gathered material for his first crime novel, Death of an Old Goat, which was published by Collins in 1974. By then he had moved to Norway, first as a lecturer at the University of Bergen, eventually becoming professor of English literature at Tromsø University, inside the Arctic circle, which provided the background for his 1980 novel, Death in a Cold Climate.
With a dozen novels and critical studies of Charles Dickens and Christie already published, he returned to Britain in 1984 to concentrate on his fiction, adopting the city of Leeds as his new home. He became an active member of the Crime Writers' Association, in particular its northern chapter, and also threw himself into the Brontë Society, based at the parsonage at Haworth, of which he became vice-chairman and then chairman. His devotion to the Brontës resulted in an illustrated biography of Emily Brontë for the British Library in 2000 and A Brontë Encyclopedia, compiled with his wife and published this summer, as well as two crime novels: The Missing Brontë and the cheekily titled The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori.
In all, Barnard produced more than 40 crime novels and dozens of short stories. He was also a popular speaker at conventions and conferences, especially at Malice Domestic, an annual fan convention in the US, where he won numerous awards and was guest of honour in 1998.
Unlike other English male crime writers of his generation – Reginald Hill, Peter Lovesey and Jonathan Gash were contemporaries – Barnard did not benefit from television adaptations, nor indeed from large paperback print-runs and, for many years, only American paperbacks of his work were available in the UK as imports. The reason often given as to why he was not more of a household name was that although his novels were zestful and witty, he never established a strong series hero (seen as a vital asset in publishing crime fiction). In fact, he experimented with several central characters over the years, creating the policemen Perry Trethowan and Charlie Peace and even, under the pen-name Bernard Bastable, utilising Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as the detective in a short series of historical mysteries.
He regularly described his detective stories as "deliberately old-fashioned" yet they were often vehicles for sharp social satire, resulting in high social comedy. Among his favourite targets were the church, television soap operas, the class system, academic rivalries and politics and politicians and his satirist's aim was never more true than in Posthumous Papers (1979), Sheer Torture (1981) and especially Political Suicide (1986), a book still treasured by political journalists and lobbyists.
Barnard received the Crime Writers' Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 2003. His last novel, A Charitable Body, was published in the US in 2012. The rapid onset of dementia resulted in his being admitted to a nursing home in Leeds earlier this year. He is survived by Louise.
• Robert Barnard, crime writer, born 23 November 1936; died 19 September 2013