A Pity About the Girl and Other Stories

The Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master in 1988[1] and in 1990 he was presented Bouchercon's Lifetime Achievement Award.

[2] The locales vary from London to Latin America and the time frame from the present back to the Victorian days of Sherlock Holmes.

A number of them, such as the title story, "A Pity About the Girl", and the two concerning Colonel Cristobal Ocampas, have an unexpected grimness about them.

"Michael was an exceptionally fine storyteller, but he's hard to classify," said one of his British publishers after his death.

"He's not a hard-boiled writer in the classic sense, but there is a hard edge to him, a feeling within his work that not all of society is rational, that virtue is not always rewarded".