Professor Robin Winks

Historian of unusually varied interests

Robin William Evert Winks, historian: born West Lafayette, Indiana 5 December 1930; Randolph W. Townsend Professor of History, Yale University 1957-2003, Director, Office of Special Projects and Foundations 1974-76, Master, Berkeley College 1977-90; married 1952 Avril Flockton (one son, one daughter); died New Haven, Connecticut 7 April 2003.

Robin Winks twice asked me to contribute to the mammoth Mystery and Suspense Writers: the literature of crime, detection, and espionage (1998) he and his co-editor Maureen Corrigan were putting together – for which both later received the Edgar Award from the Crime Writers of America. Twice I had to turn him down due to pressure of other work.

Which was a pity. Even though the fees per article were as despicably paltry as for any kind of encyclopaedic or reference writing, he was the kind of editor for whom one tends to pull out all the stops. Not only did he have a reputation for running a tight ship (so wouldn't let you get away with slack writing or wishy-washy judgement), he also knew his stuff: not necessarily the norm for reference-work editors.

Even more than that, he was a passionate advocate for the crime and mystery genres, writing or editing a number of important studies over the years, including Colloquium on Crime (1986) and Modus Operandi: an excursion into detective fiction (1982). His enthusiasm for the form was by no means fannish, but rigorous, energetic and scholarly, yet he didn't forget that this was, after all, entertainment fiction, its main object, as he once put it, "to offer up a bit of puzzlement".

Wicks was captivated by puzzlement, as well as bafflement, in fiction as well as in real life (he was an expert on, possibly an insider in, "spook business" and counter-intelligence). For nearly 20 years his review column "Post Mortem" ran monthly in The Boston Globe, a "must-read" for his views and acute critical judgements. The critic and novelist Julian Symons thought him "the best critic of crime stories in America". He was, of course; and much more.

Born in 1930, in West Lafayette, Indiana, Robin Winks was the son of schoolteachers who restlessly moved where the work was during the Depression, ending up in Colorado. At high school he was a noted athlete (specialising in running the old 440 yards) and football player (a solid quarter-back). He also, while still at high school, held one of the highest recorded speed-typing scores in Colorado, and to the end of his days scorned the electric, and did all his creative work – writing or editing nearly 30 books – on a manual, typewriter.

He graduated (magna cum laude) from the University of CoIorado, gaining a bachelor's degree in History and a master's in Ethnography in 1953, having already gained a master's degree after studying Maori on a Fulbright scholarship at Victoria University in New Zealand, where he met and married Avril Flockton (the marriage was to last over 50 years). Back in the US he took a history PhD at Johns Hopkins in 1957.

That same year, having rejected careers in newspapers and the diplomatic service, Winks began teaching at Yale University, which was to become his academic base for nearly five decades, although from time to time his own interests, as well as calls from non-academic bodies (and on occasion the government) took him to foreign climes. He also began trekking through his own country's interior, becoming an authority on America's National Parks system, over the years visiting every park, every battlefield, every monument; in 1999 the NPA named a gold medal award for education after him.

His interests and enthusiasms were astonishingly varied. He was an expert on Canadian history, out of which came Canada and the United States: the Civil War years (1960) and The Blacks in Canada (1971, still the only historical survey that covers the 350 odd years of the African Canadian experience). This led him naturally to the British Empire, about which he wrote and lectured extensively, even parading his formidable expertise at Oxford University, where he lectured on the subject during 1992-93. He wrote The Age of Imperialism (1969) and The British Empire (1981), and edited the "Historiography" volume of The Oxford History of the British Empire (1999). Much of his research he did on the hoof, visiting Australia, the Solomon Islands and other former British colonies for first-hand impressions of the local terrain.

Winks was a busy and enthusiastic lecturer, having visiting lectureships at universities around the world. He enjoyed lecturing on shipboard cruises, and still found time to research and write a biography of the 19th-century railroad entrepreneur Frederick Billings (Frederick Billings: a life, 1991), who combined money-making, railroad building (he was president of the Northern Pacific) and nature-conserving (by helping to establish Yosemite as a National Park); and a life of the latter-day conservationist Laurance Rockefeller (Laurance S. Rockefeller: catalyst for conservation, 1997), not to mention the deeply researched Asia in Western Language Fiction (1990).

Perhaps Winks's most acclaimed yet controversial work was the Pulitzer-nominated Cloak and Gown: scholars in the secret war, 1939-1961 (1987), an in-depth study of the way American intelligence agencies recruited from the cream of the student pool in Yale, Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League Almae Matres during the Cold War (which he had already written about, in The Cold War, 1964, when it was at its hottest). He revealed a good deal of tradecraft secrets about the personalities who flitted through the espionage shadows of the old OSS and its successor the CIA, and was perhaps rather more simpatico towards that mad Reds-not-just-under-but-in-the-bed obsessive James Jesus Angleton than he need have been. Significantly a ban was clapped on certain chapters of the book, which, together with his notes and files, are now locked away in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Winks's knowledge of the subject was impressive, at times startling. Oddly, at the height of the Vietnam War (1969-71), he was plucked from the groves of academe to become cultural attaché at the US Embassy in London, at a time when, generally speaking, in embassies across the globe spooks tended to gravitate towards the offices of the cultural rather than the military attachés.

Robin Winks was surely a fulfilled man. He was certainly much admired by his peers; according to Jon Butler, chair of Yale's history department, "We stood in awe of [his] unbounded energy . . . and a scholarship incomparable in its range and depth."

In describing the type of person the intelligence bureaux found at colleges like Yale – "the idiosyncratic individual, the person of odd curiosity and distinctive knowledge, the freewheeling thinker who went past tested systems and conventional wisdom to the untried" – Robin Winks might almost have been describing himself, and he was surely the only internationally known academic ever to have a throwaway remark about a decent suit quoted with approval in the promo of a Savile Row tailor.

Jack Adrian