Catherine Aird

It has been just over six months since my last Mystery Monday post. It’s not that I haven’t been reading mystery novels (my second-favorite genre) but that I just haven’t been moved to write a post (a bit of a general problem the last year or so).

But I haven’t been idle, quite to the contrary. I’ve now gone through the other three (of the five) character series by Lawrence Block (Keller the Killer, Chip Harrison, and Evan Tanner). Prolific writer, Block.

And I’ve read nearly all of the Sloan and Crosby murder mysteries (also known as the Chronicles of Calleshire) by yet another British writer, Catherine Aird.

Kinn Hamilton McIntosh, MBE (1930-present), writes under the nom de plume of Catherine Aird. As with most writers, she has written a number of short stories, but she is best known for her character series, Chronicles of Calleshire, which are both cozy British murder mysteries as well as police procedurals.

These feature Detective Inspector Christopher Dennis Sloan and his Watson, the dim-witted but fast-driving Detective Constable William Crosby. D.I Sloan, the older and more experienced, is married and grows roses. He’s usually unwillingly saddled with the young jejune D.C. Crosby, typically because Sloan’s supervisor, the irascible Superintendent Leeyes, wants to get Crosby out from under foot at the station.

It may be already apparent that these are a bit on the comic side, although I didn’t find them to be anywhere close to laugh-out-loud. The occasional grin, mostly due to the author’s wordplay, was about it for me.

Aird’s writing is usually described as literate and light, and I suspect readers with a strong interest in literature or writing (and British murder mysteries, obviously) might find her more engaging than I did. I liked her work enough to read all the ebooks my library had of the series. Oddly, the five that weren’t available are the most recent ones, except for the penultimate and final books. Here’s the list:

1. The Religious Body (1966)
2. A Most Contagious Game (1967)
3. Henrietta Who (1968)
4. The Stately Home Murder (1969) [aka The Complete Steel]
5. A Late Phoenix (1970)
6. His Burial Too (1973)
7. Slight Mourning (1975)
8. Parting Breath (1977)
9. Some Die Eloquent (1979)
10. Passing Strange (1980)
11. Last Respects (1982)
12. Harm’s Way (1984)
13. A Dead Liberty (1986)
14. The Body Politic (1990)
15. A Going Concern (1993)
16. Injury Time (short stories, 1994)
17. After Effects (1996)
18. Stiff News (1998)
19. Little Knell (2001)
20. Amendment of Life (2002)
21. A Hole in One (2005)
22. Losing Ground (2007)
23. Past Tense (2010)
24. Dead Heading (2014)
25. Learning Curve (2016)
26. Inheritance Tracks (2019)
27. Constable Country (2023)

My library doesn’t have (as ebooks) 20-22 or 24-25. Not sure if that reflects a lack of interest in the series over time, but it might. It’s a matter of personal taste, but Aird’s series wasn’t highly engaging for me. I found her writing a little bothersome — not in lacking quality (which is has) but in its endless digressions.

There is also that she was 71 when she published Amendment of Life and 92 when she published the last one, Constable Country. There does seem some decline in her work judging by the last two books. She was 35 when she published the first one, so her work spans almost six decades.

But, again, personal taste obtains, and (as a friend of mine said recently), if I say something is “okay” then it’s probably something most people would say is “pretty good” (or better). I’m as picky about my reading material as I am with my food. Actually, probably more — I eat more junk than I read.

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At some point while reading these, I started making notes. That’s usually (but not always) a bad sign — an indication of disengagement, if not disenchantment, with the material. In this case it represents a frustration with the writing. The first note reads:

Too many narrative observations, often trivial or obvious. For example, “… Of course, the light was beginning to go by then, too.” “Naturally,” said Sloan. Not even murder brought the world to a standstill. [Whoever suggested it did?]

In the next paragraph: There was no appeal against the light in pursuit of crime. Rain didn’t stop play either.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it were isolated, or just infrequent, but the books are filled with internal interruptions of dialog and narrative flow. I often had to go back several paragraphs (or more) to recall what the last spoken sentence was. This goes on constantly.

Sloan’s mind seems to wander. A lot! Some might find that a plus, but I found it distracting. So many irrelevancies that it’s almost narcissistic or self-indulgent. I found myself wondering if Aird has ADHD. (As a side note, she doesn’t seem to be much of a feminist. The stories often have a kind of old-fashioned male point of view.)

Crosby is obviously meant to be comic relief. Sloan constantly berates him for driving too fast. And Crosby never improves! He seems, in fact, to get worse, a kind of caricature. He’s constantly whispering and muttering when they interview people involved with their case. Sloan frequently thinks about reprimanding him, but we never see that. Oddly, while Sloan is careful speaking to his superior because he worries about his pension, Crosby is incorrigible yet still employed.

If anything, there is a static feel to the books. In part because Aird seems to do a lot of telling rather than showing. Sloan and his wife, Margaret, have a child at one point, so time does elapse, and various aspects of technology do change as the books go from 1966 to 2023, but there is no real character development, especially for Crosby. Sloan’s homelife is often referred to (Aird tells us he loves to grow roses), but we don’t see much of it.

Another quote illustrating Aird’s sense of wordplay:

“Everyone’s a bit nervous about firearms these days.” Sloan was glad to hear it. He himself was nervous about firearms all the time. Especially in the line of duty. The firing line, you might say.

As with Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, there are French and Latin phrases. (One nice thing about ebooks is the ability to highlight a passage and get a translation.) And there are many references to Shakespeare, Greek classics, and the Bible. And as is often the case with British writing, there are many references to historical, cultural, and current events likely known only to those steeped in all things British.

Aird is clearly very literate, but Sloan and (especially) Crosby aren’t. They can, in fact, be weirdly dumb. In the last book, they have to have “embezzlement” and “petechiae” explained. What cop, especially a detective, could be unfamiliar with those words? There seems no popular media in Aird’s world, just the classics. Even the legal term “battery” seems foreign, or at least old-fashioned, to Sloan. There seems, sometimes, a lack of authenticity to the police procedural aspects.

Part of her world-building involves an imaginary island, “Lasserta”, which is important to the UK because they mine (the equally imaginary) “querremitte” there (“the hardest mineral known to man”). And there are many local institutions and characters that recur throughout the series.

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I mentioned above a decline in the last two books. One example is a bit between Sloan and the (regular character) forensic pathologist, Dr. Dabbe:

“I think we are agreed, Sloan, that dead men tell no tales.” “Yes, sir,” said Sloan, although in fact he was not at all sure that he did agree with the proposition.

Yet earlier in the same book, Dr. Dabbe says:

“If I could have a motto over the door here it would be Mortui Vivos Docenti.”

Which is Latin for “The Dead Teach the Living.” It seemed a strange disconnect to me. (I wondered, in these later books, if she lacked a good editor.)

I also noticed that she not only reused the last name Wakefield but reused it for somewhat similar female characters (who each appear only in their respective books and have no relation to each other). Might have been a real-life friend of hers she wanted to honor, but it caught my eye. In my experience, authors try to find new names for characters that only appear in one book.

She also all but repeated bits of text in two cases. Not exactly cut-and-paste, but such close repetition that I wondered if I’d accidentally gone back a few chapters. The writing at times seemed so vague to me that I wondered if it was a much earlier manuscript that had been published years later, but references to Sloan’s (unseen) kid suggest not.

And there were a couple of mental digressions Sloan takes that were so weird and, to me, off-the-mark that I had to note them. In the first, a character tells Sloan about the etiquette of leaving a party and Sloan mentally compares it to leaving a crime scene. Those two things aren’t anything alike. In the other, he somehow conflates being dismissed from his superior’s office with (the myth about) lemmings running off cliffs. Maybe it’s meant as humor, but it fell flat with me.

Aird must be something of a grammarian. Proper use of words gets mentioned fairly often. One bit used in two books is:

“I shall drown, and no one will save me.”
“I will drown, and no one shall save me.”

One is suicidal, the other is a lament.

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Bottom line, I enjoyed them enough to read all I could easily (and for free) get my hands on, but don’t plan to make an effort to read the five I couldn’t. They were okay reads but had an almost cartoonish sense that made them less engaging than, say, Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh (both of whom I like a lot). Some think Christie isn’t a “good writer” but having read a number of pretenders to her throne now, it’s clear just how skilled she was.

[See Agatha Christie, All the Christie, and Ngaio Marsh.]

One last note: It may be due to the ebooks, but all the earlier novels have abrupt scene changes between paragraphs with no obvious typographical break to indicate the scene change. In a few cases, it almost seems deliberate the way one scene segues into the next, but that could be my imagination. Two of the books from different ebook publishers did feature a row of three asterisks between scenes.

I noticed that the two last books, while not especially longer than the earlier ones, had a lot more chapters. Her early books usually had 18 or 19. The last two had 33 and 44, respectively. I wondered if that was the author’s response to the lack of breaks in the ebooks. Lack of typographical niceties is a common problem in ebooks.

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Aird was new to me until this year, but Lawrence Block is an old friend. I’ve long ranked his Bernie the Burglar series among my favorites. They’re light, literate, and funny — a joy to read. [See this post or this one.]

In the last Monday Mystery post, I wrote about reading another popular Block series, the Matthew Scudder books (one of which, A Walk Among the Tombstones, was adapted into a decent 2014 movie starring Liam Neeson).

Now I’ve read his other three (less popular) character series.

First was the Keller the Killer series, which is about a professional, albeit somewhat whimsical, hitman. There are only a handful of these:

1. Hit Man (1998)
2. Hit List (2000)
3. Hit Parade (2006)
4. Hit and Run (2008)
5. Hit Me (2013)

All except Hit and Run are fixups of previously published short stories. There is also a 2016 novella, Keller’s Fedora, which I haven’t (yet) read.

Second were the last two of the four the Chip Harrison novels. The first two, No Score (1970) and Chip Harrison Scores Again (1971) are apparently sex romps about a guy (Chip) trying to get laid. The latter two, Make Out With Murder (1974) and The Topless Tulip Caper (1975) are sex romps but also crime capers. They were entertaining fluff with cute titles.

Third was the Evan Tanner series:

1. The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep (1966)
2. The Canceled Czech (1966)
3. Tanner’s Twelve Swingers (1967)
4. The Scoreless Thai (also known as Two for Tanner; 1968)
5. Tanner’s Tiger (1968)
6. Here Comes a Hero (also known as Tanner’s Virgin; 1968)
7. Me Tanner, You Jane (1970)
8. Tanner on Ice (1998)

The first wasn’t available. Tanner is sort of an inept James Bond who manages to be successful despite himself. The stories have him sneaking across various international borders trying to bring someone out of whatever hot water they’ve landed in. Typically, Tanner ends up bringing out more people than expected (in one case, an entire woman’s gymnastic team).

Tanner, due to a brain injury during the Korean War, has lost the ability to sleep (apparently this can actually happen). Because he has all 24 hours of the day available, he’s learned a lot of languages. And he donates to and maintains membership in a large number of fringe groups, many dedicated to restoring lost regimes or states.

In the last book, published 28 years after the penultimate one, Tanner is revived from the cryogenic freezer someone stashed him in (against his will). It was the only way Block could bring his Korean War vet into the modern era still young enough for the required antics.

These books are truly wild, a little bit weird, and utterly improbable, but a lot of fun. I have yet to be disappointed by Block’s writing.

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Stay lighthearted, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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