Protection (Harpur & Iles S.)

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Peter, you've persuaded me! Books 7 to 16 are now on the tbr list. May 09, 2008 Peter Rozovsky said... His best known work, written under the "David Craig" pseudonym and originally titled Whose Little Girl are You, is The Squeeze, which was turned into a film starring Stacy Keach, Edward Fox and David Hemmings. The fourth Harpur & Iles novel, Protection, was televised by the BBC in 1996 as Harpur & Iles, starring Aneirin Hughes as Harpur and Hywel Bennett as Iles.

I'd say he has a more theatrical style than Ken Bruen. If Bruen is something like an Angry Young Men playwright, Bill James is something like a Christopher Marlowe. I've read all the Harpur & Iles books, seven or eight of them more than once, and I will look forward to the next one, which apparently will have the intriguing title In the Absence of Iles. Which of the books have you read? 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". Crime drama serial. A pair of none too friendly Welsh C.I.D. men team up to investigate the kidnapping of the son of a gangster. Hywel Bennett, shorn of his baby face and much puffier due to his drinking dominates. There is no subtlety in his character.Impish and perhaps hyperbolic, but with a purpose. I suspect that no one on this Earth has read enough crime fiction to make such a judgment. But he is the finest crime-fiction prose stylist I have ever read. Did you have in mind folks like G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene or even Joseph Conrad, if one wants to call The Secret Agent crime fiction? If so, I shall have replies ready. When the heist is finally pulled off, halfway through the novel, Colin ambush doesn’t work out as expected. Driven by anger, guilt, and fear, hunting down the killer becomes a personal affair for Colin. Dominating all, however, is the relationship between DCS Colin Harpur and ACC Desmond Iles. Harpur and Iles are trapped in a hellish relationship of need and hatred. Each needs the other's skills to work effectively against the crooks. But Iles hates Harpur for having had an affair with his wife; Harpur is trying to keep Iles away from his underage daughter. And Harpur tries to shore up his Chief Constable, who is recovering from a breakdown, against Iles's constant undermining and baiting.

A well-dressed corpse found shot in the sand and gravel wharf sparks trouble for Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and his unpredictable boss, Assistant Chief Constable Iles. In his first book, Bill James applied the same technique of dropping the reader in the midst of an investigation, and it’s a great change of pace for many authors who love to build up everything right from the beginning. And I can’t resist a bit of showing off: Here’s a picture (lower left) of Bill James and me from Crimefest 2010. 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.

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I just read Roses, Roses, my first Harpur and Iles. I liked some of the writing and certainly the plot, but it drove me crazy that all the characters speak in the same voice; Harpur's teenage daughters' conversation is indistinguisable from Iles' except for the subject matter. Also at times the characters seemed to be speaking Pennsylvania Dutch. My two cents. March 03, 2010 Peter Rozovsky said... 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: There is something in what you say. Commentators often invoke drama when talking about Bill James, and I find some of his best books delightfully theatrical. The similarity of speaking styles may contribute to that effect, as if the characters are speaking lines. I like the effect, and it might be a worthwhile experiment to keep your comment in mind as I reread one of the books. Thanks very much for a thought-provoking comment. March 03, 2010 jwarthen said... His novel Whose Little Girl are You, written under the "David Craig" pseudonym, was filmed as The Squeeze, starring Stacy Keach, Edward Fox and David Hemmings. The fourth Harpur & Iles novel, Protection, was televised by the BBC in 1996 as Harpur & Iles, starring Aneirin Hughes as Harpur and Hywel Bennett as Iles.

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.OK, maybe just a bit mischievous. But doing so felt better than hedging and fudging. I have read a number of the other authors you suggested, and all merit consideration in any discussion of prose style among crime writers, perhaps Hill especially. But being deliberately provocative can be fun. 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. 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. Ultimately I suspect Harpur and Iles was green lit as a production to rival S4C and Channel 5's successful, dour Welsh 'tec thriller A Mind to Kill and to compliment the BBC's other chalk and cheese cops Dalziel and Pascoe. The fact that both of these were infinitely better than this offering ensured it was given a hasty demise and not a second thought.

Detective Superintendent Colin Harpur (Aneirin Hughes) has to put up with Iles dodgy ways and he just wants to do his job by the book. The geographical profiler carries her own baggage. Weighed down with guilt because her sister was the victim of killer who has never been caught, she is also, at the start of the novel, at odds with the Metropolitan police. She used to work with them until they ignored her recommendations and went ahead with a scheme to catch a killer that turned into an entrapment scandal.

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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.) At times a cop must heavily rely on his colleagues and also upon tipsters and this time around it is Lloyd’s Bank that’s become a target for a major heist. However, then the heist is postponed, and a cop is murdered, one tipster and another is murdered Harpur is driven to his limit and forced to bypass all the regulations set forth to settle everything once and for all. 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. The biggest influence on my style probably came when I worked for the Daily Mirror in London. Tabloid style is terse and plain. I think I try for these qualities in the books, though I can fall into wool now and then. On the other hand journalism hates irony - because readers might take leg-pulls literally. But I feel free to do a bit of irony now. Also, many newspaper 'stories,' as news reports are known in the trade, are to a formula. I've had to try and get out of that with made-up stories meant to go between covers.