Peter Rozovsky writes the Detectives Beyond Borders
Blog. He has written essays and introductions for Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction and The Cultural Detective: Reflections on the
Writing Life in Thailand. He reviews international crime fiction for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is a newspaper
subeditor, a freelance writer and crime-fiction editor, and the father of
Noir at the Bar.
Some of us remember where we were when John F.
Kennedy was shot or World War II ended; I remember where I was when I first
read Bill James. I was having coffee and a scone and passing the time of day at
my local secondhand bookshop when the owner said, "Hey, you might like
this" and handed me Roses, Roses, tenth novel in James' Harpur & Iles
series.
Two pages in, I was Siddhartha
Gautama under the Bodhi tree. I was Hugh Hefner at that magical moment when his
mother said, "Hugh! Stop studying so much. Go find a nice girl." I
read a third of the book, brushed the crumbs from my upper lip, and said:
"I'll take it."
What makes Bill James so much fun to
read? Here is part of what James told me in an interview: “I tend to get bored reading books where the dialogue is very
sequential and reasonable.”
The same goes with James’ narration. Here is a snippet from I Am Gold, Book 27 in the series:
"Harpur thought the greeting, regreeting, fizzled
with emptiness and formula. Naturally it did. It came from the manual — Besieging
for Dummies, or something like. And, just as naturally, this boy, this boy
`John' in there could recognize smooth-textured bullshit. Very likely these
calls would contain nothing but. In fact, perhaps ultimately there'd be so much
he would get disorientated by it, half smothered by it, gently and mercilessly
chinwagged into collapse and surrender by it. But, maybe he recognized this
hazard and left the phone dead for spells while he got his breath back."
That’s not a take on hostage
negotiations one is likely to find in most crime novels.
What makes the series great, other than James’ ability to make
routine passages deliciously funny? Its delicious looks at the upward
aspirations of its gangsters. Its funny, touching takes on family life. It’s
teaming of the vain, violent, ungovernable ACC Desmond Iles and his partner, DCI
Colin Harpur, who sometimes deflects and sometimes slyly returns Iles' insults,
yet who is capable of betrayals of his own. Its "brilliant combination of
almost Jacobean savagery and sexual betrayal with a tart comedy of contemporary
manners," according to John Harvey, who ought to know a thing or two about
crime fiction. And the gorgeous prose:
"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 of The Detective is Dead:
"When someone as grand and profitable as Oliphant
Kenward Knapp was suddenly taken out of the business scene, you had to expect a
bloody big rush to grab his domain, bloody big meaning not just bloody big, but
big and very bloody. Harpur was looking at what had probably been a couple of
really inspired enthusiasts in the takeover rush. Both were on their backs.
Both, admittedly, showed only minor blood loss, narrowly confined to the heart
area. Both were eyes wide, mouth wide and for ever gone from the
stampede."
The series hits its stride around its seventh book and becomes a
kind of grand and cracked portrait of Britain's shifting urban and social
landscape at the end of the twentieth century, of the murky boundaries between
police and criminals, of suburban social climbers who happen to be killers and
drug dealers, of the strange ways people build families in changing times. The
books are violent, dark, and often very funny. And their author just may be the
best prose stylist who has ever written crime fiction in English.
