It’s possible to appreciate a novel without enjoying it much. That’s my reaction to Scarecrow, the first novel in the Lieutenant Dickerson series, first published in 1945.

Lieutenant Joe Dickerson is a Boston detective with a reputation for case-solving. His superior assigns him to go to the small town of Sudwich, Connecticut as a consultant, to help with the first murder the town has seen in many years. Sudwich has one industry, run by Old Man Kendall. But the old man has withdrawn from the world since his son Cotton was lost in combat in the Pacific.

One day, a strange, misshapen figure turns up in the town square, saluting the flag. Soon after, the town Lothario is found shot to death in his car, and a local beauty is stabbed in her apartment. That’s when they call in Lt. Dickerson. Dickerson sets about painstakingly analyzing crime scenes, interviewing witnesses, and picking his way through a tangle of relationships, hatreds and other motives to finally identify the murderer (whose identity did surprise me).

What I appreciated about Scarecrow was the (relatively) realistic portrayal of professional police work. Dickerson doesn’t rely on flashes of intuition, or on his flashing fists, but on science and reason. I suspect (I don’t know) that this book may have been an advance in the police procedural sub-genre. (Dickerson does, in a rudimentary way, the same sort of thing they used to do on the CSI shows.)

What I didn’t like was that the book was boring. It took forever for the plot to get going. The dialogue was stilted, all the characters speaking in the same formal, unnatural way. Also, this was clearly the work of an Englishman, though the setting and characters are American – there were Britishisms everywhere, “petrol” for gasoline, and “torch” for flashlight, for instance.

So I can’t recommend Scarecrow very highly. Though you may appreciate the utter absence of profanity.