Posted by: Dinah Forbes - Executive Editor, McClelland & Stewart

On October 21, the coldest night of the fall so far, Peter Robinson’s fans and admirers bravely fought through a few tiny flakes of snow to pack into the Crush Wine Bar in downtown Toronto for a terrific birthday bash. It wasn’t the author’s birthday, and it wasn’t exactly the birthday of his hugely popular detective, DCI Alan Banks, but it was the twenty-first birthday of Banks’s first appearance in fiction. He is such a real character and has grown and changed so authentically over the course of the eighteen novels in which he features that it seemed odd he wasn’t there in person to blow out the candles on his chocolate birthday cake.

Spotted in the crowd were crime-fiction writers José Latour, Howard Shrier, and Rick Blechta; IFOA impresario Geoff Taylor; Martin Levin, books editor at The Globe and Mail, and several women I cannot name who would have loved to meet an off-duty Alan Banks in person. All of them were also there to celebrate the publication of All the Colours of Darkness, Peter’s latest Inspector Banks novel, and were delighted to meet the author, who spent much of the party in the corner, trying to avoid the gaze of an eight-foot tall poster of himself and autographing copies of the new novel for a line-up of fans.