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William (Bill) Knox (1928-March 1999) was a Scottish author, journalist and broadcaster, best known for his crime novels and presenting the long-running STV series Crimedesk.

Born in Glasgow, Knox became the youngest journalist for a Glasgow newspaper at age 16. He went on to report on crime, motoring and became a news editor.

He began writing crime novels in the 1950s. Knox often wrote under pseudonyms, frequently for the American market. These included Michael Kirk, Robert MacLeod and Noah Webster. In all he published over 50 crime novels, including a several series, notably the "Thane and Moss" books.

In the 1970s he was approached by Scottish Television to present a series asking for public assistance in solving crimes in the central Scotland area. Similar to Police 5 (with Shaw Taylor, broadcast in the Thames Television area) Knox presented the fifteen minute slot for over ten years, always signing off with the promise that any calls to the police "can be in confidence". At this time he also made a series of short programmes called Tales of Crime, also for STV, in which he recounted famous Scottish criminal cases.

His final novel, The Lazarus Widow, was unfinished at the time of his death, and was completed by Martin Edwards.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bill Knox", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0