DNF: 'Gently Go Man' by Alan Hunter

This is the eighth in the series of relaxed murder mysteries about genial detective George Gently, written in the later fifties and early sixties. I've enjoyed my previous forays into the series, as much for the authentic slices of post-war British life as for the murders themselves, which were always a bit ho-hum. But this is the first to lose me completely. Hunter has always fancied himself as a chronicler of regional accents and dialects, with (in my opinion) very limited success, and the last few books I read he happily stayed away from such dangerous distractions. But this time he plunges headfirst into a whole world of cultural slang, the bizarrely unreadable language of 'hip chicks', with their talk about squares and being cool. For example:

‘You wouldn’t dig it,’ said Maureen. ‘If you’re a square you’re a square. It’s nowhere jazz to a square. But Laurie was cool, he went after it. Shooting the ton, that sort of action. But like I say you wouldn’t dig it. So what’s the use me talking?’

Here’s another sample:

‘Throwing a curve,’ Deeming said. ‘That’s not lying, it’s trying it on, hoping it’s going to fit some place. You don’t like hipsters in Squaresville. You like to put the heat on them. So you make a deal out of Johnny and come pushing us around with it.’
‘And like we don’t stand for it,’ Bixley said, stepping up closer.
‘Cool it, Sid,’ Deeming said. ‘Pitching screws is for squares.’
‘He bugs me, this guy does,’ said Bixley. ‘Me, I could spread him on the wall.’
‘Dicky says cool it,’ Maureen said. ‘So cool it quick, you big ape.’

There are entire chapters of this sort of stuff and frankly, life's too short to wade through it. One star for a DNF.

Mystery Review: 'Gently To The Summit' by Alan Hunter

This is the ninth in the series about the genial but sharp-eyed detective, George Gently, and just in case anyone out there is paying attention, yes, I did miss out number eight. OK, so I got confused, alright? There are forty-something in the series, so this is a problem that's only likely to get worse. One thing that's interesting about reading the whole sequence in order (well, more or less) is the subtle but noticeable change in approach. In the early books, Gently sucked peppermint creams constantly, ate vast meals (described in some detail) and merely ambled through the landscape, populated with a variety of dialect-speaking hicks, as clues and suspects fell at his feet. Book by book, however, the eccentricities have fallen away and what remains is much more of a conventional police procedural, albeit still fossilised in post-war Britain.

A large part of the enjoyment of these stories is the period setting, and although there are fewer details than previously, this is still a world of diggings and cheery landladies, three course lunches and a well-delineated class system. I find it curious that anyone with pretensions to grandeur feels quite at liberty to be obstructive and downright rude to the police. There is still the uneasy air of rebuilding after the war, not simply of bombed out houses, but of people too. The loss of many records in council offices, churches and the like means that anyone who wants to can simply vanish and reinvent themselves, with no one able to check their history, and this makes an interesting plot point here.

This is perhaps the best of the series so far. The premise is that an unsuccessful pre-war attempt to climb Mount Everest, which resulted in the death of one climber, comes back to haunt the participants when the supposedly dead man turns up again, plaintively searching for his wife. There's an immediate outbreak of disbelief, a very public spat with another expedition member, followed by lawsuits, whereupon the other climber falls to his death (a slightly less dramatic death, on Snowdon). Gently potters about London and Wales, in his relaxed way, uncovering the details, and if the suspects line up rather too easily and the big reveal is blindingly obvious, the tale is none the worse for that. A mildly entertaining, if not particularly challenging, little mystery. Three stars.

Mystery Review: 'Gently With The Painters' by Alan Hunter

This is the seventh of the series about the genial pipe-smoking George Gently, now promoted to Superintendent, and chafing rather at his desk-bound life. The author is getting into his stride now, and many of the rather dated quirks which enlivened the earlier books have been dropped - no more peppermint creams, for instance, and the investigation is much more conventional - Gently visits various suspects, asks them questions and mulls over the answers. He even philosophises over his approach, describing it as more art than science. There are still meals, fortunately; I do enjoy Gently’s hearty meals. Grapefruit, followed by liver and bacon for breakfast, then toast and marmalade. Lunch is naturally a multi-course affair - soup, steak, new potatoes and peas, followed by apple turnover and 'custard sauce'. Not quite as vintage as the brown Windsor soup of a previous book, but still entertainingly large.

The other vintage aspect of these books (these early ones were written in the mid to late fifties) is the attitude to women. Female characters are never regarded as being worthy of attention. They may have evidence to impart, like Dolly the barmaid (addressed simply as 'Miss'), or they may be right in the middle of the action, like the girlfriend (addressed respectfully as 'Miss Butters' because her father is someone of importance; the class system is alive and well), but they are otherwise ignored. One woman who takes a car and drives off in it causes a tremor of alarm in the policemen: you mean she was on her own, they cry plaintively. A woman who dislikes her husband is inevitably thought to be a lesbian (even though there's absolutely no evidence of it). Often the women are portrayed as being on the verge of hysteria. The girlfriend would be a prime suspect in any rational story of this type, but it never occurs to anyone to investigate that angle. A woman of that era could probably get away with literal murder because no one would imagine her capable of it.

The actual perpetrator of the crime is not terribly surprising, although there's a lot of obfuscation along the way to avoid revealing the identity too soon. Gently, of course, guesses it early on and then, Poirot-like, spends time circling around in a slightly underhand sort of way. I have to say, though, that the murderer's motivation was not terribly convincing. And for all the comments about how clever he was, it always seems to me to be fairly stupid rushing round after the crime trying to pin it on other people. Nevertheless, this was one of the better books of this series. The attempts at dialect have almost entirely gone (not quite, sadly), the investigation depends less on lucky breaks than before and Gently himself is now a much more believable character. Three stars.

Mystery Review: 'Gently In The Sun' by Alan Hunter

This is the sixth in a very long series of murder mysteries featuring the middle aged Inspector George Gently, all written in the fifties and sixties. This one is back by the seaside, in a small and not very interesting village baking in a heatwave (cue lots of comments along the lines of 'what a scorcher' and frying eggs on the pavement). A beautiful young woman visitor is found murdered on the beach beside the fishing boats. The locals can make nothing of it, and Gently is summoned from Scotland Yard to solve the case.

Books of this type depend on one of three factors to give them legs. Either the mystery itself is ingenious, or the setting is evocative, or the detective is interesting enough to carry the story. The mystery here is neither clever nor (frankly) very interesting. The best murder mysteries give the reader enough information to work out the solution for themselves, but here there are three obvious suspects with motives yet the identity of the perpetrator and the actual motive are such that they can't really be deduced. There were one or two aspects that might be guessed at, but that's it.

Nor is the setting interesting. The author has already dealt with a seaside holiday setting in an earlier book ('Gently By The Shore') and this adds nothing new. The author describes the heatwave and the inevitable thunderstorm which follows in unconvincing purple prose. And the detective has become almost invisible, doing very little here except stand around while clues and information materialise in front of him. He does very little actual investigation, interviewing the obvious suspects while relying on 'intuition' to divine the truth of the matter. But at least he has stopped chewing peppermint creams, his only quirk now being to play with a pipe from time to time.

This series has never been very compelling. The plots are weak, the characterisation unconvincing and the writing might best be described as workmanlike. For me the charm has always been in the period details of post-war British life - the food, the clothing, the social distinctions and attitudes and so on. Sadly there is very little here of interest - some snippets of clothing, a reference to florins and a small coastal village which still has an active fishing trade. The only meal mentioned is salad and trifle, although a great deal of ice cream is consumed. Without the historical veneer, the story is exposed as a flimsy and insubstantial affair, with Gently inexplicably fascinated by one character while ignoring other possible leads, doing very little detective work until the solution is simply presented to him. I assume this is meant to be his unique characteristic as a detective, to simply stand and watch while the mystery unfolds itself before his eyes, but it really isn't a convincing technique. Two stars.

Mystery Review: 'Gently Through The Mill' by Alan Hunter

The fifth in the long series of George Gently detective novels, there are no radical departures here. A murder is committed in a small town mill, the local plods can make nothing of it and send for help. Gently arrives and in his quiet, understated style uncovers all the hidden secrets and solves the murder. As always, the charm is in the portrayal of English post-war life, captured as effortlessly as clicking a camera shutter. This was published in 1958, and the first few pages alone reveal a different world: hot cross buns made only for Good Friday, for instance, instead of appearing in the shops shortly after the Christmas decorations come down, and a stag party which is an annual affair and has nothing to do with weddings, being simply a male-only excuse to get plastered (so some similarities to the modern do, obviously).

Food is a big part of Gently’s daily life, and although the peppermint creams, the signature of the earlier books, rate only a single mention here, there are still plenty of edibles about. Gently likes a proper breakfast, with bacon, egg and kidney. Lunch might be onion soup, followed by ‘a very good sole with sauce tartare’, then apple charlotte. And cheese, of course. Another day it might be beefsteak pudding, followed by treacle tart and custard, with hot rum beforehand and a liqueur and cigar afterwards. A picnic lunch is cold chicken and salad, apple turnover, biscuits, cheese and fruit, and four thermoses of coffee. Good, solid working lunches, these. And given that the plot centres around a mill and the attached bakery, there are cakes and pastries abounding, too.

In between these energy-sapping meals, Gently sits about watching the likely suspects until their concocted stories quietly unravel. This is possibly the best of these books so far, since none of the revelations depend on Gently luckily finding himself in just the right place at the right time. He also makes a few mistakes in his investigations, which makes him seem much more humanly fallible. The villain turns out to be a very satisfying and plausible possibility, the local plods, while confident the murderer can’t possibly be a local man, are much more realistic in their protestations, and there are signs of depth in some of the minor characters, too. And thank goodness, there are no painful transcriptions of local dialect to contend with. This is not quite four stars, but it’s certainly a very good three stars.

Mystery Review: 'Landed Gently' by Alan Hunter

This is the fourth of a very long series featuring the genial but persistent detective, George Gently. As the terrible pun of the title suggests, this episode sees Our Hero staying with the great and the good (or at least the rich and titled) over Christmas, where the festivities are inevitably interrupted by a murder. The setting, a large country house of some antiquity, gives the book the atmosphere of Agatha Christie fanfic. I usually enjoy the period details of these books, written in the fifties, but this is ground that has been covered a thousand times before - the creepy attics and winding stairs, the secret passages, billiard rooms and libraries, the butler and housemaids, the dressing for dinner and stuffy formality. There are some details of the meals which would interest foodies, but otherwise I found it a little ordinary.

The characters never quite seem to work in these books. Gently himself is almost too self-effacing, allowing others to take the lead in the investigation and then mildly asking the one crucial question that reveals the significant little detail. But this is better, perhaps, than the over-the-top buffoonery of his superior, who blusters and expostulates his way through the interrogations, completely confident in the innocence of the aristocracy and insistently looking for the murderer amongst the obviously less trustworthy lower classes. Then there is the lady of the house, who lies outright to the police and, when pressed, has hysterics or falls into a swoon at Gently's feet. Did women ever fall into swoons under stress? Perhaps Victorians struggling for breath in their tightly-laced stays, but certainly not normal, healthy women in the more accommodating fashions of the nineteen fifties.

The ending was slightly melodramatic, but not a huge surprise, on the whole. The murderer was apprehended, justice was done and so on and so forth, according to the conventions of such books, and no tricks were employed by the author to deceive the diligent reader keeping track of the likely suspects, so a satisfactory conclusion all round. The series isn’t great literature, and doesn’t compare with Agatha Christie, but this is a pleasant, undemanding read with an interesting backdrop of upper class and upper middle class life at the time. Three stars.

Mystery Review: 'Gently Down The Stream' by Alan Hunter

This is the third in a very long series featuring the genial detective Inspector George Gently, he of the pipe and peppermint creams. This one is set in 1957 or thereabouts, and has the same faded postwar charm as its predecessors, describing an England which in reality probably didn’t survive the war, and certainly wouldn’t survive the brutal modernity of the sixties. This is an England where a landlady routinely provided three cooked meals a day for her guests, where everybody smokes and wealthy middle class suspects could be incredibly abusive to the police in their cut-glass accents and the police had no option but to politely grin and bear it. The past is a different country indeed.

Historical interest aside, the plot is a nicely convoluted affair, with a whole horde of suspects, all witholding information or outright lying, all in cahoots with one other, all with hugely plausible motives and a wonderfully tangled web of events to be teased into separate strands by our patient detective. Unlike previous books, this time our hero doesn’t just happen to bump into significant characters at exactly the right moment, or just happen to walk into the crucial location and conveniently spot a clue, he has to work things out from first principles. And this would be absolutely wonderful if only I hadn’t guessed the solution to the mystery instantly. Perhaps I’ve watched too many TV cop shows, I don’t know, but this one was really easy.

Nevertheless, I kept turning the pages just to see if I’d got it right and there were a satisfying number of red herrings. There are a few irritants, mind you. The cast of hick locals with unlikely regional accents is well to the fore and, sadly, just as irritating as in previous books. The author would do better to stick to straightforward English that needs less translation effort from the poor reader. Still, it doesn’t get in the way too much. This is a nicely gentle and readable story for those who can get past the odd accents and quaintness. Three stars.

Mystery Review: 'Gently By The Shore' by Alan Hunter

The second in a very long series of British police procedurals (sort of) with all the faded charm of their post-war era - quaint references to Brown Windsor soup and jam roly-poly, diggings and National Service, plus a seaside town with two piers which haven’t yet been burnt down, and tourists who arrive by train on Saturday for a week’s full board. There’s a certain interest in these little details even without the murder mystery.

Other aspects haven’t worn quite so well. The writing style is not quite up to snappy modern standards, and the characters are more like caricatures. Here’s the Scottish sea captain called in to tell the police his story: “We drappit down here owernight and fetchit up at Wylie’s before the toon was astir. I paid aff the crew bodies and saw them awa’ to the station, then I lifted the hatch and huiked out the cargo. He wasna in the best o’ shape, ye ken – it gi’es me a deal o’ consolation thinkin’ o’t – but I gar him ha’ a wash, whilk he did, and a swig at the borttle, whilk he didna, and betwixt doin’ the ain and not doin’ t’ither he was sune on his legs agin and marchin’ off doon the quay.” Got that? Good.

The plot, which starts off as a traditional body-on-the-beach, soon descends into fifties Iron Curtain paranoia, with a Trotskyite conspiracy, no less, and an over dramatic finale. Gently himself, the peppermint cream sucking detective, has his moments, but he is helped rather by just happening to go into a particular cafe, or see a particular car, or notice a particularly suspicious character, which chance event inevitably leads to the revelation of a Big Clue. And this particular plot was greatly helped by a significant character deliberately and voluntarily giving him a great deal of important information. I’m tempted to go for two stars, but in honour of the Brown Windsor soup and two piers, I’ll be generous. Three stars.

Mystery Review: 'Gently Does it' by Alan Hunter

The first in a very long series of amiable detective murder mysteries, in the tradition of Agatha Christie. There’s a murder, local plods jump to the obvious conclusion, our hero patiently steers things in the right direction, the villain is apprehended and all is well with the world. There are some nice characterisation touches - the daughter of the Dutch businessman has been very sheltered, and still has a noticeable accent, while the son, more out in the world, has mostly lost his. But the author tries a little too hard with the charming eccentricity of the detective - the bumbling act, apparently not taking too much notice but seeing a great deal, the peppermint creams, the ambling about without obvious purpose but just happening to be in the right place at the right time. I see what he was getting at, but it doesn’t quite convince me. But things might settle down in future books (I got several when they were a very low price). A lightweight, unchallenging but enjoyable read, with some nostalgic details from its era (1955). Three stars.