Martin Fido

Martin Fido
Born	(1939-10-18)18 October 1939 Penzance, United Kingdom
Died	2 April 2019(2019-04-02) (aged 79) North Falmouth, MA, USA
Occupation(s)	University lecturer, writer and broadcaster
Known for	True crime writing and broadcasting
Notable work	Murder After Midnight, LBC

Martin Austin Fido (18 October 1939 – 2 April 2019) was a university professor, true crime writer and broadcaster. His many books include The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper, The Krays: Unfinished Business, The Official Encyclopedia of Scotland Yard, Serial Killers, and The Murder Guide to London. He is also one of the authors of The complete Jack the Ripper A to Z.

He was educated at Truro School and Lincoln College, where he gained a First in English, then took a Master's degree on Benjamin Disraeli's novels at Balliol College, Oxford. After leaving college in 1966, where he had been a junior research fellow in English, he went to the University of Leeds where he lectured in English until 1973, during which time he met his first wife, Judith, a fellow lecturer. They had two children, Rebecca and Abigail. In 1971 he went to Michigan State University in the USA where he was a visiting associate professor for one year, and after his marriage ended, he became a reader in English Literature and head of the English department at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados in 1973. In the West Indies he was active in theatre and educational broadcasting, and during this time he married his second wife, Elaine, and they had a son, Austen. When the marriage ended, he resigned from his job to write a book, but he lost seven years of work in a fire.

In 1983 he returned to England and moved into a block of flats previously occupied by the Kray twins, and became a freelance writer and broadcaster, specialising in true crime. He broadcast a weekly radio segment on London's LBC Radio series Leading Britain's Conversation called Murder After Midnight from 1987 to 2001, some of which were produced and released commercially on cassette and CD by his friend (and fellow LBC broadcaster) Paul Savory. Edited versions of the scripts were also released in book form. Aside from his many true crime books he has also written illustrated biographies of Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde, and books on Agatha Christie, and Sherlock Holmes. He translated Louis Cazamian's Le Roman Social en Angleterre, and his play Let's Go Bajan! was performed successfully in Barbados and London.

In 2000, with his three children all adults, he settled in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA, to help his third wife (Karen, née Sandel, died 29 October 2013) nurse her parents through their terminal illnesses, and from 2001 until his death he taught writing and research at Boston University, including a course called “Sympathy For The Devil”. He was himself a practicing Quaker.

Martin Fido, who was suffering from cancer in his later years, died on 2 April 2019 of complications resulting from having suffered a fall.