Protection (Harpur & Iles S.)

Product Information

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.

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. Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles (Hywel Bennett) is an abrasive, cynical copper who has eyes on the top job. 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... Hywel Bennett, shorn of his baby face and much puffier due to his drinking dominates. There is no subtlety in his character.

Finally, given that you spend a lot of time writing about unsavoury criminal behaviour do you have a jaundiced view of society and mankind in general? Peter, you've persuaded me! Books 7 to 16 are now on the tbr list. May 09, 2008 Peter Rozovsky said... Since The Mermaids Singing, McDermid's work has just got better and better, the pinnacle being last year's A Place of Execution - a tremendous piece of fiction, complex and haunting. Killing The Shadows, good as it is, isn't in that class. McDermid's books are always frighteningly convincing, but Killing The Shadows doesn't quite convince in the same way, I think because there is something too 'fictional' about the central conceit of somebody targeting crime writers. 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. 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.

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. Most fiction has sex. It's sometimes disguised as romance or love interest. Where would Madame Bovary be without it, or The End of the Affair, or Romeo and Juliet or Anna Karenina or Mills and Boon or Lady Chatterley or Anthony Powell? As for no department's being willing to tolerate an Iles for long, James made this interesting declaration in an interview I did with himLAnd 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. The narration of the story at times switches to the killer himself- and it’s through his storytelling that the reader gets to know the innermost thought of the faceless monster, his delusional motivations. As a reader, you will also get a glimpse of the killer’s next victim, a young girl who writes romantics lines in her diary. 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? You're not the first reader to invoke revenge tragedies in discussing James, though you are the first I've seen to throw Basil Fawlty into the mix. I suspect James would be delighted.