Lately I’ve been spending too much time scrolling through those short videos you find on Facebook and YouTube (I believe many of them originate with Tinder, but I’ve never dared cross that threshold). I had conceived a fear that, like so many people nowadays, I was losing my ability to concentrate. Perhaps my impatience with the novels I’ve been reading lately arose from losing my capacity to persevere through a book.

Gallows Walk by Giles Ekins relieved my mind greatly. The book has many flaws, but it engaged my interest and kept me reading.

Gallows Walk is the first volume in a series set in the town of West Garside, near the city of Sheffield in Yorkshire, during the early 1950s. Our hero is Detective Inspector Christopher Yarrow. He was a flyer in World War II, but lost an eye, rendering him unfit for duty. He is mourning the early death of his wife. He is an intelligent and sympathetic policeman, annoyed by the laziness and bullying tactics employed by some of the older detectives.

The story involves many subplots, but the main narrative concerns a robbery that goes badly wrong. A career criminal attempts to grab a bag of payroll money being carried by a messenger, but meeting resistance, ends up killing a man with a shotgun and, in his escape, hitting a little girl with his car, causing her death. The criminal goes into hiding, and we follow the manhunt as Inspector Yarrow follows up every clue with frustratingly slow progress, and the criminal discovers how hard it is to keep a low profile in a country howling for your blood.

Author Ekins has an unusual style. He tells the story in an episodic way, pausing now and then to provide historical information that’s not strictly necessary to the story – the sort of thing some authors would put in footnotes. The story moves at a leisurely pace, which readers could find boring. But it all worked quite well for me. I liked the depth of the characters – good and bad – and Yarrow’s sympathetic nature. Some digs are taken at the traditional sexual roles of the time, and I confess I sympathized a good deal with the old guard. Still, by and large I found the book very congenial.

The author has some bad habits. The grammar isn’t always correct, and he has a bad habit of forgetting the initial quotation marks in subsequent paragraphs of an extended speech. He also sometimes forgets which tense he’s writing in.

Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed Gallows Walk, and have bought the sequel.