John Reeves is part of the second generation of powerful and talented CBC-Radio producer-directors, following in the tradition of Andrew Allan, Esse Ljungh, Rupert Caplan, and J. Frank Willis. Reeves's reputation also rests on his inventive radio plays, noteworthy for their linguistic acrobatics, as well as their use of verse and prose, music, and shifting points of view. Some of these plays were published in the 1960s and 1970s. In the course of his career Reeves has also composed more than thirty pieces of religious music and several opera librettos. Most recently he has become a mystery-fiction writer.

John Michael Reeves, son of Albert George and Doris Helen Swinburn Reeves, was born in Merritt, British Columbia, on 1 December 1926. At the age of three he moved with his family to England, where his father, an Anglo-Catholic minister, took a parish in Lincolnshire. There, Reeves discovered a lifelong love for...