Peter Costello (3 April 1946, Dublin) is an author and editor, described by the American critic Robert Hogan in the Greenwood Dictionary of Irish Literature as “a contemporary embodiment” of the “tradition in Irish literature of the independent scholar, who has an erudition embarrassing to the professional academic”.
He is married with two sons, one of whom is Patrick Costello, a former Green Party politician who served as a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin South-Central constituency from 2020 to 2024.
His book The Real World of Sherlock Holmes when first published in 1991, was revised for republication in 2006 as Conan Doyle Detective, translations of which appeared in French and Spanish, with additional material.
Peter Costello has also written in the field of cryptozoology, e.g. his In Search of Lake Monsters (1974), and The Magic Zoo: The Natural History of Imaginary Animals (1979).
A second edition of In Search of Lake Monsters (1974), with a long introduction by Dr Bernard Heuvelmans, “the father of cryptozoology” was published in French in 1978.