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    The Ferryman's Beautiful Daughter
    The Ferryman's Beautiful Daughter
    The Ferryman's Beautiful Daughter
    Ebook41 pages38 minutes

    The Ferryman's Beautiful Daughter

    By Peter Robinson

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    About this ebook

    From the New York Times bestselling author comes a riveting collection of short fiction, marked by the piercing psychological insight and brilliant characterization that are hallmarks of his acclaimed novels.

    Ever since the publication of his first mystery featuring Detective Inspector Alan Banks, Peter Robinson has been steadily building a reputation for compulsively readable and perceptive novels that probe the dark side of human nature. Plumbing the territory that he has so successfully staked, The Price of Love and Other Stories includes two novellas and several stories featuring the Yorkshire policeman at his finest.

    In the novella “Going Back,” never before published in the United States, Banks returns home for a family reunion, only to find it taking a decidedly sinister turn. In “Like a Virgin,” written especially for this volume, Banks revisits the period in his life and the terrible crime that led him to leave London for Eastvale. And in between, the disparate motives that move us to harm one another, from love and jealousy to greed and despair, are all explored with fascinating depth.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 29, 2009
    ISBN9780061979088
    The Ferryman's Beautiful Daughter
    Author

    Peter Robinson

    One of the world’s most popular and acclaimed writers, Peter Robinson was the bestselling, award-winning author of the DCI Banks series. He also wrote two short-story collections and three stand-alone novels, which combined have sold more than ten million copies around the world. Among his many honors and prizes were the Edgar Award, the CWA (UK) Dagger in the Library Award, and the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy Martin Beck Award.

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      Book preview

      The Ferryman's Beautiful Daughter - Peter Robinson

      The Ferryman’s Beautiful Daughter

      Short Story

      Peter Robinson

      For Sheila

      Contents

      Introduction

      Begin Reading

      Afternote

      About the Author

      Other Books by Peter Robinson

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      Introduction

      For someone who considers himself primarily a novelist, I seem to have written rather a lot of short stories. I have also been very fortunate in that my publishers want to publish them in collection form, which induces a retrospective frame of mind in me as I gather these tales together and prepare them for publication.

      Most of the stories in this collection were written at the request of one editor or another. I know that sounds rather mercenary, and that, in the Romantic view of art, the writer is supposed to work from pure inspiration. But I think of the stories as challenges, and sometimes a challenge can bring out the best in a person, or at least it can bring to the surface something he didn’t know he had, something he hadn’t explored before. And that is very much the case in this collection.

      I’m not going to go into details here about the content or origins of any of these stories. I’m saving that for the afternotes because I don’t want to spoil anything for those readers who, like me, want to know as little as possible about a story or novel they are about to read. I will say, though, that some of these requests for stories opened up new directions for me, took me places I would not normally have gone, and forced me to dig deep into areas where I might never have ventured left to my own devices.

      In some cases, I simply set off into the dark without even a light to guide my way, moving from one word to the next and letting the story find itself. In others, I thought and fretted about the story for months, shaped it in my mind, despaired over it, scrapped it, started again, and when I was finally driven by the demands of a deadline to put fingers to keyboard, it came out as something different, often something better than I could ever have hoped for.

      I have said before that I find short stories difficult to write, and that is still the case. The discipline is exacting and the amount of space in which I sometimes feel I have to maneuver feels quite claustrophobic. The bits I have to leave out would probably make a novel. But the satisfaction level is high. I remember when I used to write mostly poetry, I would sometimes work for weeks trying to get a poem right, especially when I began to value form and structure as much as, if not more than, Romantic self-expression or postmodernist confessional. Everyone who has ever written a poem knows that to make it work you sometimes have to

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