A very British obsession

British writers are leaders in crime fiction, writes Aditi Phadnis

What do Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple and Sherlock Holmes have in common? Well, they’re all just…so English! (Poirot’s Belgian origins and his disdain for the English notwithstanding.)
 
Nordic crime writing is unquestionably outstanding, whether it is Henning Mankell or the Socialist couple, Maj and Per Wahloo whose books are a scathing critique of the state system. There are hundreds of others in between — trust me, there was a world of Nordic noir before Stieg Larsson. The despair of the human condition is captured wonderfully by the French (from Maigret to Fred Vargas). Japanese and Russian writers (Higashino and Akunin) are almost playful in the way they write about crime but nevertheless provide us with deep understanding of culture, family, gender relations and contemporary society. And D A Mishani captures the tensions, corruption and brittleness of Israeli politics and society as a seemingly disinterested bystander investigating its seedy underbelly.

 
But say what you want, the leaders in crime fiction are still the British. There must a sociological explanation for this, but some of the best writers are women. Elizabeth George’s protagonist, the thoroughly modern 8th Earl of Asherton, Detective Inspector Thomas “Tommy” Lynley, views the deviations of the lower classes with empathy and understanding though he loses his wife Helen to very young thugs whom he encounters in The Job . PD James’s Adam Dalgliesh is a police commander who wears his power lightly and is an understated poet. Among the more recent, Elly Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway is an archaeologist who advises the police on the provenance of the corpses they find. And Belinda Bauer’s books work because of their deep sense of how British rural communities work (and don’t work), and of the tensions between locals and incomers.

 

Some newer writers such as Minette Walters and Clare Macintosh craft their stories without one single protagonist — which seems like a lot more work because they cannot slide into the comfort of getting their characters to create the plot. The plot itself has to be unassailably strong.
 
Somewhere in between comes Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. Bill Slider makes a debut in Orchestrated Death,  the first novel in the series  as a tired policeman — tired of his loveless marriage with his socially ambitious wife, Irene, exhausted by the demands of the job and defeated by the limits to intellectual enquiry. Slider is “a smallish man, with a mild, fair face, blue eyes, and thick, soft, rather untidy brown hair”. His colleague and best friend, Jim Atherton, is the direct opposite: A sunny tempered gay lothario (“the nearest he got to saying ‘no’ to a woman was, “not now, we’re landing”) who is at once a gourmet cook (which makes him very popular with the ladies) and a highly educated but feckless investigator prone to quick theorising about murderers (he’s mostly wrong). It is Atherton to whom we owe some of the most entertaining insights into human character delivered sometimes in Latin and sometimes via puns that must have taken enormous effort to achieve but seem to roll off completely spontaneously.

 
In most other crime novels, a love affair comes somewhere in the middle of the series. But in this case Slider finds the love of his life less than 100 pages into the first book.  The author describes the moment he meets Joanna Marshall and shakes her hand: “Warmth came back to him along the line of contact, and pleasure; their eyes met with that particular meeting which is never arrived at by design, and which changes everything that comes afterwards. As simple as that? he thought with a distant and profound sense of shock”. Through the series, Slider and Joanna’s extramarital affair goes on as a leitmotif.

 
Ms Harrod-Eagles’s plots are not all that complex. But what gives them weight and heft is the interactions of the characters — Slider’s domestic life, Atherton’s love life (boisterous and then fairly tranquil), the police team — and her very clever use of language and excellent descriptive abilities. She explores politics in the office with consummate understanding and the most delightful character is Detective Superintendent Fred “The Syrup” Porson, wonderful boss and singularly gifted operator of the language salad spinner.
 
All her books are set in the vicinity of Shepherd’s Bush in London: Where she grew up. Slider and Atherton are fond of a pint at the local pub called the Dog and Scrotum — though that’s not its real name, of course, it’s called the Dog and Sportsman but the sign shows a man in a trilby and tweeds cradling a gun with a black Labrador jumping up at him —preparatory to digging its fangs into the man’s middle….

 
“Language, my dear Bill, is a tool – not a blunt instrument,” Freddie Cameron, the police surgeon, tells Slider. Good fun.
 
Pandemic Perusing is an occasional column about books and reading by our writers and reviewers