David Pinner (1940–2025)

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The man who wrote the novel behind The Wicker Man was born in Peterborough, and came back to write a play about Hereward the Wake.

A life in dates

  1. 1940Born in Peterborough on 6 October
  2. 1967Ritual published by Hutchinson; Fanghorn reaches the West End
  3. 1973The Wicker Man released; the Key Theatre opens in November
  4. 1970sPlaywright in Residence at the Key Theatre
  5. 2014The Wicca Woman, a sequel to Ritual
  6. 2025Dies on 22 December, aged 85

The actor

David John Pinner was born in the city on 6 October 1940 and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, beginning a career that ran in three directions at once, acting, playwriting and fiction, for more than sixty years.

Television viewers of a certain generation knew his face without knowing his name.

On screen

  • Emergency Ward 10
  • Z Cars
  • Father Brown
  • Henry V
  • The Prince Regent
  • The Growing Pains of PC Penrose
  • Miss Marple: A Murder Is Announced

On stage

  • Laertes
  • Edmund
  • Bassanio
  • Sergeant Trotter, The Mousetrap

Ritual and The Wicker Man

It was during that run in The Mousetrap that he wrote Ritual, published by Hutchinson in 1967. A story of paganism and murder in a closed rural village, it caught the attention of Anthony Shaffer and became the seed from which the 1973 film The Wicker Man grew: a lineage Pinner always acknowledged and the film’s makers later qualified.

Whatever the precise debt, Ritual has become a foundational text of British folk horror, reissued repeatedly and given a sequel, The Wicca Woman, in 2014.

The Key Theatre homecoming

His Peterborough return came in the mid-1970s, and it is the part of his story the city should know best. The Key Theatre had opened on the Embankment in November 1973, and in its earliest seasons Pinner served there as Playwright in Residence, writing Hereward the Wake, a dramatisation of the Fenland outlaw whose followers sacked Peterborough Abbey in 1070.

A Peterborough-born writer, at Peterborough’s new theatre, putting Peterborough’s oldest legend on stage: it is hard to imagine a neater piece of literary homecoming.

The wider body of work

The wider body of work is remarkable in its range.

  1. 1967 Ritual Novel
  2. 1967 Fanghorn West End, with Glenda Jackson
  3. 1970s Hereward the Wake Key Theatre, Peterborough
  4. The Potsdam Quartet Lyric Hammersmith, BBC, New York
  5. A trilogy of plays circling Stalin
  6. A trilogy of vampire plays
  7. A play on the feud between Newton and Hooke
  8. 2014 The Wicca Woman Sequel to Ritual
  9. Dropping Out of Seaweed Sky Poetry
  10. Journeys in Trance Poetry

He also wrote radio dramas for the BBC. The two poetry collections came in his seventies and eighties, and he was still writing, and still attending rehearsals of his own work, into his eighties.

Last years

David Pinner died on 22 December 2025, aged 85, of pancreatic cancer.

Friends remembered a man of enormous warmth and mischief who was as likely to deliver a chunk of Shakespeare unprompted as to discuss his own work, and who had, somewhere along the way, been quietly christened the godfather of British folk horror.