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Martin Austin Fido (born October 18, 1939, Penzance, Cornwall, United Kingdom) is a university teacher, true crime writer and broadcaster. His many books include The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper, The Official Encyclopedia of Scotland Yard, and The Murder Guide to London.

After leaving Balliol College, Oxford 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. In 1971 he went to Michigan State University in the USA where he was a Visiting Associate Professor for one year, and in 1973 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 the West Indies he was active in theatre and educational broadcasting. In 1983 he returned to England and became a free-lance writer and broadcaster, specializing in true crime. He broadcast a weekly radio programme called Murder After Midnight on London's LBC Radio 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. 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 he settled in Cape Cod, America to help his third wife (Karen) nurse her parents through their terminal illnesses, and since 2001 he has been teaching writing and research at Boston University.

He is the uncle of Penelope Friday, an erotica and sci fi author living in Kent.

A selection of Fido's "Murder After Midnight" series plus a special on Fred And Rosemary West called "The Wests", (which was never issued or broadcast) have recently been made available for download on iTunes and at Amazon.com's MP3 store. (Search: Martin Fido).

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