English writers are well known for mysteries, but not (so far as I’ve noticed) much for hard-boiled mysteries. English private detectives tend to the very cerebral, like Sherlock Holmes, or the very domestic, like Miss Marple. If novelists want to write gritty crime stories, they’ve traditionally chosen police procedurals.

But Keith Dixon has broken ranks. In the novel Altered Life he introduces private eye Sam Dyke (one assumes the name’s a tip of the fedora to Dashiel Hammet), a two-fisted shamus who works the mean streets of Manchester (and they’re plenty mean).

As the novel begins he’s meeting with Rory Brand, who runs a high end consultancy service that’s branching out into software development. Rory believes somebody’s plotting to ruin him, and he wants Sam to investigate. Sam says no thanks. The job calls for skills he doesn’t possess. Anyway, he doesn’t like Rory much.

The next day Rory is dead, his neck broken. And when Sam (rather guiltily) attends the funeral, he meets someone important from his own past. One of Rory’s subordinates hires him to investigate the murder, and there’s a kidnapping, and things get dangerous.

The prose is good, and I had only a few nitpicks about word choice. Although there’s one sour comment about Margaret Thatcher, there’s also a positive view of the business world that frankly surprised me in an English book. Sam Dyke is as tough a detective as you could ask for. All to the good.

On the negative side, I found him kind of dull. I know it’s a trope to make a hard-boiled gumshoe a wisecrack artist, but that serves a purpose, like the fools in Shakespeare’s tragedies. It prevents things from getting too dark, and keeps the detective from being a bore. Although Sam has a couple moments of cleverness, all in all he’s a dour fellow, and I got a little tired of him.

Also, in the final showdown, I thought he was just foolhardy, walking unprepared into a situation he knew he couldn’t control, leaving his fate to dumb luck.

Nevertheless, I thought Altered Life a commendable debut, and I might just read another Sam Dyke story.

Cautions for language, violence, and adult themes.

I’m not sure what to think about Harry Hole (pronounced “WHO-leh.” You’re welcome), Norwegian author Jo Nesbø’s series detective who’s catching on very well in the current vogue for Scandinavian mysteries.

In The Devil’s Star, Harry displays one characteristic that I’ve grown very weary of in fictional detectives. He’s a mess in his personal life. He’s an alcoholic, it’s ruining his job and his relationships, and he doesn’t care enough about himself to fight for his life. He’s a superior police detective, but lately he hasn’t come to work for days at a time. He loves a woman who loves him – and her son adores him – but he’s stepping back from them, afraid of commitment and failure, haunted by profound fatalism.

But it’s high summer, “holiday season” in Oslo, and the police are operating with a skeleton force. When his supervisor (who’s name is Bjarne Møller – an homage to the 1970s American cop comedy?) needs to send two detectives to a murder scene, he can find no alternative to calling Harry, and teaming him up with his worst enemy – Detective Tom Waaler, who Harry is convinced is not only corrupt, but a murderer.

The murder victim shows marks of ritual – one finger has been cut off, and a star-shaped diamond left on the body. Soon there’s another similar murder, and another, and it becomes a full-fledged serial case.

I was fairly impatient with the first half of the book, where Harry stumbles (sometimes literally) around, either drunk or hung over most of the time, pushing away all attempts to help him. But in the second half things start moving, and Harry comes to life at last, and I was pleased pretty well by that part. The final showdown was exciting and effective.

Attitudes toward religion are interesting in The Devil’s Star. Christians (Pentecostals and Orthodox) show up – I’m not entirely sure why, actually – and are not depicted as entire idiots. Harry does take one swipe at Christianity (unfair, in my view), but we are also told that he believes in the soul, and a formula he often repeats, “Paradoxes don’t happen,” is flatly contradicted by another character, who seems to know what she’s talking about.

All in all I liked The Devil’s Star better than I thought I would. Cautions for language, gore, and mature themes (some of them pretty kinky).

The theme song above will be familiar to many Americans of my generation. I was in junior high in 1963 when it first appeared on Walt Disney’s TV show, and it left a vivid impression. The Scarecrow of that series was a hero and a benefactor, a quiet vicar in a village church in coastal Kent who helped his parishioners earn a decent living through smuggling, while striking a blow against high tariffs (hurrah for free trade!).

The hero of Doctor Syn: A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh (the last book chronologically in the series, though first written – author Russell Thorndike had not intended to create a series character) is no particular hero. He seems to be a complete hypocrite in his Anglican ministry, as he is perfectly capable of casually ordering an innocent man murdered for “knowing too much.” He has certain positive traits too, but all in all he’s a particularly devilish example of what used to be known as a “picaroon” in fiction – an unapologetic rogue.

His Scarecrow costume serves a purpose – he rides with his cohorts in frightening disguises in order to scare people off the marsh on the nights when his pack trains are carrying contraband to and from the beaches. He is little concerned by the arrival of a naval ship to investigate smuggling in the parish, but a particular member of the crew – a mute mulatto with his ears cut off – sets fear in his heart. For Doctor Syn has a dark secret, and the mulatto knows it.

A particular weakness of this book is that author Thorndike seems to want to be Dickens. He loads his story with comical “characters” who slow the story down considerably with their long stories and speeches. Another problem (which I noticed years ago when I read the next book, Doctor Syn on the High Seas), is fairly vicious racial attitudes (though this was softened when I realized that the vicar was not intended to be a role model). This racism seems to be mostly directed at black people, as Imogene, the female ingenue of the story, is said to be half Incan Indian, and gets no less respect for that.

I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed in Doctor Syn, but I still plan to buy and read the rest of the series. Maybe Thorndike will develop his character into something a little more like the one Patrick McGoohan played back in the ʼ60s.