A Touch of Frost ― Classic Radio Crime

RD (Rodney David) Wingfield was educated at the Coopers Company School and—along with the rest of the school—was evacuated to Frome, Somerset during World War II. Exempted from National Service due to his poor eyesight, he had various office jobs before becoming a clerk for the Petrofina Oil Company in Epsom. In his free time, he wrote radio plays, and in 1968 the BBC bought his 45-minute play Compensating Error. They soon commissioned a further two, and Wingfield decided to give up the day job and become a full-time writer. Over the next two decades, he produced numerous successful BBC Radio dramas, as well as a comedy series starring Kenneth Williams as a secret agent, The Secret Life of Kenneth Williams (1971-73). In 1972, Macmillan commissioned Wingfield to write a crime novel. His completed book, Frost at Christmas, was rejected. Wingfield decided to turn it into a radio play, Three Days of Frost, instead, with Leslie Sands playing Frost. A second Frost radio drama, A Touch of Frost, was broadcast in 1982, starring Derek Martin. Frost at Christmas was finally published in Canada in 1984 and in the UK in 1990. It was followed by A Touch of Frost (1987), which was apparently one of three detective novels chosen by David Jason for his holiday reading a few years later. He was to write four more Frost books before his death in 2007, one of which, Hard Frost (1995), was nominated for an Edgar Award. The final one, A Killing Frost, was published posthumously in 2008. However, the continuing popularity of the character led to a prequel series by James Henry, First Frost (2011), Fatal Frost (2012) and Morning Frost (2013) set in the early 1980s and featuring Frost as a Detective Sergeant.