As he sat down again, Smith said, ‘I can’t remember the exact occasion when I first said this to you, but I know I’ll have said it before. The time will come when you’ll have to choose between being a high-ranking, well-paid and officially respected police detective, and being a good one. This shouldn’t ever happen, but in my experience it always does….’
Peter Grainger’s series of police procedurals starring Detective Sergeant D.C. Smith has been one of my reading pleasures for some time. They’re rather quiet books, short on action scenes and long on character and atmosphere. It’s been a delight to watch Smith carry on his eccentric career, defying his superiors when necessary, nurturing his investigative team.
Smith was badly wounded at the end of the last book, so when Songbird opens he’s out of the picture. He will show up, but he’ll be peripheral to this story. Now is the time to watch the young detectives he’s trained operating without training wheels.
The main character in Songbird is Detective Sergeant Chris Waters, who now occupies the exact position in the hierarchy where Smith used to be. Since he took the job on, things have been quiet in the fictional East Anglian town of Kings Lake. But now a body has been found.
It’s the body of an attractive woman, found strangled near a caravan (mobile home) park. The investigative machinery starts moving, and before long a suspect has been identified. DNA evidence seems incontrovertible. The big brass are ready to lock the suspect up and celebrate their win.
But Chris is pretty certain they’re wrong. He can’t explain away the evidence (yet), but this particular suspect seems to him incapable of such a crime – for several reasons.
In the tradition of D.C. Smith before him, Chris Waters will, very carefully, defy his superiors’ wishes and look for alternatives. Fortunately for him, he has allies he never expected.
I missed D.C. Smith himself in his usual role – though Smith does have a part to play in the story – but Songbird had all the usual pleasures of a Grainger novel. I fear (and this is a criticism I’ve made of a lot of police series) that the story is overpopulated with woman detectives. I think Phil once looked up the statistics, and women in the British police are not nearly as ubiquitous as they are in the fiction. Also, I figured out the big red herring right away. But all in all, I liked Songbird a lot. And there are hints that Smith himself may find a new role in the future.
No particular cautions are necessary, for adult readers. Recommended.
While I’m in anccord with most of your review, I remain confused about how the higher representation of women in police in fiction than in reality can be a ‘criticism’? Surely, instead, this is an area where pop culture output improves upon reality?
Regardless of its factual accuracy or your intention, your observation is sexist. Why complain about this instead of any of the other familiar but, in Graunger’s case, wonderfully executed, tropes of the genre, or of the any other, many, factual inaccuracies and flights of fancy this – and detective police procedural in general – include ? Smiths character = a case in point of both. Or do you actually believe the British Police force is full to brimming with brilliant, eccentric-but-lovable detectives who, time and again, crack the case essentially on their own, backed only by a few lovable allies who join the quest as they work within, but always at odds with, ‘the (hostile) establishment’ ? Is this, along with everything else in the books, an accurate portrayal of how policing gets done, EXCEPT that there are a few too many ladies around shattering the entire – and completely realistic – illusion? Really, their pesky dilution of the factually correct and mathematically accurate ratio of testosterone to oestrogen that should be wafting down the corridors shatters the suspension of disbelief every damn time!
The key word here is ‘fiction’! And I see nothing in Graingers books that pretends to be anything but (fiction).
More importantly, though, is that we DO get to see more women police, and more women police occupying positions at all different levels of power, with fully fleshed out personalities and whose characters develop alongside the series. Far from a ‘criticism’, this is something we NEED to see (and see, and see some more!) unless we actually DO want to continue to be policed by a Force where women compose only a small minority?
I’m sure I don’t really need to explain how important representation in culture portrayals to facilitate change? This feminising shift in portrayals of police across novels, radio, TV, cinema, etc, will do more to bring more women into the real world Police Force than all the recruitment drives alone can.
Imagined worlds are powerful; we can’t be it if we can’t see it!!
In my opinion, Grainger is sadly in the minority of male crime writers whose female characters come vividly to life, rather than suddenly turning 2 dimensional due to that lack of extra pouch in the pants. Perhaps this may be at the root of your disgruntlement instead? Ie, male crime writers’ overall lack of ability to write convincing female characters? There are many notable exceptions, of course. But, in crime more than any other genre, I always feel safer reaching for a new (to me) female writer than a new (to me) male one for this exact reason . It doesn’t mean I don’t try, but I’ve found myself having to desist with too many books for it to be coincidence (and I don’t readily put a book down partway through!). May I suggest leaning more towards female writers for a while and you might just find that the gender of the character stops being such a factor in your reading of the character, and is subsumed into something you’re happy not to ‘complain’ about, like the other fictionalised aspects of fiction?
Anyway, Thank you Peter Grainger for writing good women (and good ‘bad’ women, and allthe ithers too!). And overall for an excellent body of novels so far, and – happily for this reader, a prolific one too. They’re a cut above in the police procedural genre in so many other ways too!!
All you needed to say was that I’m a sexist. Yes I am. Have a good day.