CHAPTER 79
D. M. Greenwood (b. 1939), 1991: Clerical
Errors
Suzanne Bray
Best known as the creator of the clerical detective Theodora Braithwaite.
Born in Halifax, Yorkshire, Diane Greenwood spent much of her youth
in Norfolk. She graduated from St. Anne’s College, Oxford, in 1962 and
taught classics for two years before studying theology at King’s College,
London, from 1964 to 1966. She then returned to teaching in a wide
variety of establishments: a teacher training college, a difficult compre-
hensive, a traditional grammar school and a prestigious girls’ independent
school. In 1983 she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Birm-
ingham on The Relation of Religious Experience to Teaching Religion in
Schools and found a job as an ecclesiastical civil servant for the Diocese
of Rochester with responsibility for church schools. She was appointed
Director of Education for the diocese in 1997 and retired in 2000. Lionel
Comfit’s description in A Grave Disturbance (1998) of ‘the old boot
who ran the diocesan education department, a woman of advanced years
not known for falling in with the wishes of others’ is generally supposed
to be a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the way her colleagues perceived
Greenwood.
S. Bray (B )
Lille Catholic University, Lille, France
© The Author(s) 2020
E. Miskimmin (ed.), 100 British Crime Writers, Crime Files,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-31902-9_79
367