John Rigbey joined the Metropolitan Police as a cadet in 1955. He served for seventeen years, all but eighteen months in the CID, and left in 1972. His police career was spent in north and east London and at New Scotland Yard and he was involved in the investigation of numerous murders and other serious crimes including the Kray enquiries, the murder of a senior police officer in Blackpool and a gang doping dogs at greyhound tracks throughout the United Kingdom.
Once described in the media as “one of the best informed detectives in London”, for years John Rigbey successfully operated a string of informants and was actively concerned with establishing former counter-Eoka Cypriot informants in London following “the troubles” in Cyprus of the sixties. Through his contacts he was able to smash a major extortion and protection gang in Holloway and as well making countless arrests and effecting the recovery of stolen property worth millions of pounds in today’s terms, he made major contributions to other top-level enquiries.
Leaving the police in 1972, and following two public houses and other ventures in Devon, he set up The West of England Detective Agency which is now one of the largest and most successful concerns of its kind in the South West. For many years he has been a regular contributor to an assortment of legal and other publications, he has sold options on a drama/documentary to a television company and acted as a consultant to various media companies and individuals on matters relative to London’s underworld of the sixties and seventies. He is a knowledgeable authority on many of the causes célèbres of the twenties and thirties and has given talks and lectures about several noteworthy cases.
Largely retiring from business four years ago and with the time to start writing full-time, John Rigbey started to create the “Michael Gregory” novels, basing the Detective Chief Inspector on an amalgam of senior policemen with whom he had worked and who had influenced his life. The world which he creates is one of gritty realism with no-nonsense, down-to-earth coppers and the squalid and often distasteful work they do an a daily basis.
