Protection (Harpur & Iles S.)

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I jumped on the Bill James bandwagon five or six years ago, when I first started reading crime fiction. I mean, I remember where I was and what I was doing the first time someone handed me one of his novels. It is a mystery to me, too, why he is not better known. Is he too literary for crime-fiction circles and too crime-fiction for literary circles? In 1976 you wrote a book on the novels of Anthony Powell - it has even been suggested that the Harpur and Iles series is a kind of inverted A Dance to the Music of Time. Has Powell influenced your approach to series writing? As for no department's being willing to tolerate an Iles for long, James made this interesting declaration in an interview I did with himL The bulk of his output under the Bill James pseudonym is the Harpur and Iles series. Colin Harpur is a Detective Chief Inspector and Desmond Iles is the Assistant Chief Constable in an unnamed coastal city in southwestern England. Harpur and Iles are complemented by an evolving cast of other recurring characters on both sides of the law. The books are characterized by a grim humour and a bleak view of the relationship between the public, the police force and the criminal element. The first few are designated "A Detective Colin Harpur Novel" but as the series progressed they began to be published with the designation "A Harpur & Iles Mystery".

Bill James is a veteran of the British crime writing scene and Low Pastures (Severn House, 27 January 2022) is the 36th entry in his quirky, long running series about Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and his unpredictable boss, Assistant Chief Constable Iles. What I was less keen on: the pace is slow and Low Pastures is really a repeat of earlier books in the series, which has not progressed in recent years. What Colin doesn’t expect is that one of his juniors is going to go missing- the same cop who wife Colin is having some bit of adultery. Everything else gets complicated for Colin when tipsters get murders as it appears that the gang is getting rid of the loose ends before they can finally stage their major heist. I write about organised crime, not single murders. I didn't think organised crime would be credible in Wales. We don't have cities like Glasgow, Manchester, London where large scale criminal operations happen. This is good from the point of view of living here; not so good from the crime fiction point of view. But I thought that once the Bay got going, with the huge sums of money involved, then organised crime became a possibility. So, I started the Brade and Jenkins books. Whereas Harpur and Iles are in a nowhere city, Brade and Jenkins are very Cardiff. I have another Cardiff book coming out in January, 2005, with a girl detective leading. It's called Hear Me Talking To You, and appears under my David Craig pen name. Brade and Jenkins get a mention in this one, but that's about all. So, if Wales has been neglected for crime, i'm working on it at the Cardiff end.Were you having an impish moment when you wrote that last sentence, Peter? May 09, 2008 pattinase (abbott) said... I'm gratified. I remember the afternoon when I was sitting in a secondhand bookshop, and the laconic owner handed me a copy of Roses, Roses (tenth in the series) and said, "Here. You might like this." (Or was he phlegmatic? Perhaps he was laconic on his mother's side, phlegmatic on his father's.)

France does me proud. The Harpur and Iles novel Protection has just won the Prix du Polar Européen 2004 (prize for the best crime novel of 2004). Actually, it means the best published in French. France are working through all the Harpur and Iles books and are only up to Protection, which came out here and in the US in 1988. Seventeen to go. In both cases, the author nails the voice of the cast and makes the whole situation believable. On the other hand, Harpur is left to wander around the city guessing where the serial killer might strike next. Eventually, Harpur’s investigation leads him somewhere and this results to more rivalry subplot, and soon Iles begins suspecting Harpur’s involvement with the Catholic cop with results to some bad exchanges. Given the vast number of mystery novels published each year, the idea that someone is killing off crime writers has a certain appeal - we could do with a little winnowing. That's the central premise of Val McDermid's taut new thriller Killing The Shadows, in which academic psychologist and geographical profiler Professor Fiona Cameron hunts down a serial killer working his way through a death list of mystery writers. The killer is targeting those crime writers who have turned psychological profilers into heroes. What makes him especially dangerous is the fact that his methods shatter all conventional views on the way serial killers operate. Cameron's search is given added urgency because her lover, Kit Martin, is a crime writer - and his name is on the list. If you knew how to look, a couple of deaths from the past showed now and then in Iles' face."That's from In Good Hands, and it's haunting and beautiful. James can also be laugh-out-loud funny while remaining just as haunting, as in the opening paragraph from The Detective is Dead:

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And setting, as she does, her fictional mystery writers in the real world of UK crime writing, with its Crime Writers' Association and its Dagger Awards, paradoxically makes the novel less realistic. Even so, taken on its own terms, Killing The Shadows is an absorbing read, an entertaining showcase for McDermid's abundant talents. McDermid not quite at her peak is still head and shoulders above pretty much all of the competition.