Photo: David Howells/Corbis via Getty Images (2008)
Sample of authors
Parker, Robert B.
Robert Brown Parker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, where his father was head of a telephone company. Parker graduated from Maine’s Colby College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1954 and was awarded a Master of Arts degree at Boston University in 1957. He served in the US Army infantry in Korea 1954–56.
After graduating in 1957 he worked at an insurance company and in advertising. His...
Literary figures
Virgil Tibbs
Gender: Male
Since he is an Afro-American, he is arrested as a murder suspect in a little town in Mississippi by a racist sheriff – but he can identify himself as a police detective from Pasadena in California. Despite opposition from the town’s inhabitants, he helps the local police to solve the case. The sophisticated, low-key bachelor Virgil Tibbs returns later in a further half-dozen detective stories by J...