Protection (Harpur & Iles S.)

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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. 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: 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? I write about organised crime, not single murders. I didn't think organised crime would be credible in Wales. We don't have cities like Glasgow, Manchester, London where large scale criminal operations happen. This is good from the point of view of living here; not so good from the crime fiction point of view. But I thought that once the Bay got going, with the huge sums of money involved, then organised crime became a possibility. So, I started the Brade and Jenkins books. Whereas Harpur and Iles are in a nowhere city, Brade and Jenkins are very Cardiff. I have another Cardiff book coming out in January, 2005, with a girl detective leading. It's called Hear Me Talking To You, and appears under my David Craig pen name. Brade and Jenkins get a mention in this one, but that's about all. So, if Wales has been neglected for crime, i'm working on it at the Cardiff end. 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.)

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.Your comment about oneness of style with content shall likely spark further comment from me. May 09, 2008 Steve Allan 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. This is a seedy grimy thriller with many unlikeable characters. Even Harpur is difficult to root for, even his own wife distrusts him. Also I tried to understand the psyche of a born second-in-command — someone who had a big job, but not the biggest. Iles will never make it to chief constable. What kind of personality does this produce? Answer: not eternally sweet; sometimes manic." June 06, 2011 Paula A Treichler said... 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. 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...Bill James is a former journalist who worked for the Western Mail and South Wales Echo, The Daily Mirror and the Sunday Times. He is the author of the Harpur and Iles crime series, which are published all over the world. Protection, the fourth in the series, was televised by BBC 1 as Harpur and Iles, starring Hywel Bennett. Hollywood is currently negotiating for Halo Parade, number three.

I jumped on the Bill James bandwagon five or six years ago, when I first started reading crime fiction. I mean, I remember where I was and what I was doing the first time someone handed me one of his novels. It is a mystery to me, too, why he is not better known. Is he too literary for crime-fiction circles and too crime-fiction for literary circles? By the way, I see from your profile that you liked The Ice Harvest. I've posted some comments about Scott Phillips here. May 09, 2008 Anonymous said... You’d Better Believe It the first book in a series of police procedural series introduces the reader to DCI Colin Harpur. His area of operation is a small city located south of London, and it is not unusual for the most wanted criminals to consider such a small town as an easy target. As for no department's being willing to tolerate an Iles for long, James made this interesting declaration in an interview I did with himL 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.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. Your criminals display good as well as bad qualities and your policemen (Harpur and Iles in particular) are often rather unpleasant. This blurring of the boundaries between good and evil is obviously important to you - what are you hoping to achieve by doing this? 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. Were you having an impish moment when you wrote that last sentence, Peter? May 09, 2008 pattinase (abbott) said... This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.