His death was announced by Martin Edwards, a friend and fellow crime writer, who said that Mr. Barnard's memory and general health had declined steeply in the past year.

Mr. Barnard wrote 40 novels, the first dozen or so between 1960 and 1983, while he taught English literature in universities in Australia and Norway. He returned to Britain in 1983, when his books began to sell in the United States.

His 1983 American debut, "A Little Local Murder" (originally published in Britain in 1976), received an enthusiastic welcome. Writing in The New York Times, Newgate Callendar called Mr. Barnard "one of the deftest stylists in the field (and out)." Robin Winks, an American scholar of crime literature writing in The New Republic, described Mr. Barnard's mysteries as "maliciously funny, closely plotted, acutely observed and genuinely puzzling" — a high compliment coming from an expert like himself.

Mr. Barnard called his work "entertainment" and "deliberately old-fashioned." His murders, set mainly in small villages drolly christened with names like "Hexton-on-Weir" and "Twytching," were plotted with an ingenuity and precision that made him popular among aficionados of what is known in publishing as the English cozy — mysteries with a picturesque setting, colorful locals and minimal violence. Reviewers said that many of his books crossed into the comedy-of-manners genre.

Mr. Barnard cast his cool gaze on the backbiting world of academia in "Death of an Old Goat," (1974); on the hypocrisies and frailties of churchmen in "Blood Brotherhood" (1977); and on the snobbery and pretentiousness he saw in the literary world in "A Little Local Murder."

In "Corpse in a Gilded Cage" (1984), in which a Cockney working-class family inherits a "Downton Abbey"-style estate, Mr. Barnard gives the British lower-class lifestyle a withering once-over. In "Political Suicide" (1986), he does the same with the British ruling class. It begins:

"It was a quiet Friday morning in Downing Street. The prime minister was stewing over a draft bill to privatize the armed forces, many of the aides and secretaries who normally cluttered the place were already off for the weekend, and in the kitchens the cook was preparing a light lunch of staggering ordinariness."

Mr. Barnard made most of his characters highly unlikable, explaining in an interview: "All my characters are pretty awful in one way or another, partly because they are suspects in a murder investigation and I don't really believe that nice people are potential committers of murder."

Robert Barnard was born in Burnham-on-Crouch, east of London, on Nov. 23, 1936, to Leslie and Vera Barnard. His father wrote romance serials for weekly women's magazines. After graduating with honors in 1959 from Balliol College, Oxford, he taught English at the University of New England in New South Wales, Australia, where he met his wife, Mary Louise Tabor.

Married in 1963, they moved to Norway, where Mr. Barnard was a lecturer at the University of Bergen from 1966 to 1976, when he became a full professor of English at the University of Tromso, inside the Arctic Circle, which provided the setting for his 1980 novel, "Death in a Cold Climate." He remained there till 1983.

His wife is his only immediate survivor.

Mr. Barnard won the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in 2003 from the British-based Crime Writers Association, and was nominated eight times for the Edgar Award, the top prize of the Mystery Writers of America. He received one of those nominations for his 1980 critical study, "A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie."

His last novel, "A Charitable Body," featuring Charlie Peace, a Yorkshire police detective, and his novelist wife, Felicity, was published in 2012.