Tag Archives: John Dean

Fiction, Reviews

‘Thou Shalt Kill,’ by John Dean

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I guess John Dean’s Inspector Jack Harris novels must be growing on me, because I keep reading them. Thou Shalt Kill faced one of my most difficult tests, that of dealing with religious issues. And it didn’t handle the challenge too badly.

St. Cuthbert’s Church, in the town of Levton Bridge, where Inspector Howard works, has been disturbed by the arrival in town of an “evangelical” group (“evangelical” doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing in England as it does in the US) which wishes to involve itself in the congregation’s life. But the church’s old guard wants nothing to do with their enthusiasm. The ineffectual vicar isn’t much use as a mediator.

There’s also conflict in the local “allotments,” the patches of municipal ground rented to locals for growing vegetables. The boundary disputes in the allotments can get surprisingly sharp. But nobody expected murder to be done there – until a body is found, crucified to a shed door, killed by a spike in the skull. The victim is a stranger, and his identification is false.

Then a familiar local man is found crucified in the same way, in a copse of trees near the town.

The investigation will center mainly on the religious group, delving into old crimes and hidden sins.

Whenever the contemporary English, or any Europeans, deal with Christianity, I grow uncomfortable. For most of them, religious faith is an odd fetish, like being a furry or a collector of cow creamers (Wodehouse reference). I think author Dean did a reasonable job of attempting to penetrate our peculiar world. He doesn’t get the jargon quite right, of course, and he thinks you can’t believe in the God of the Old Testament if you believe in the God of the New Testament. But all in all, the attitude didn’t seem essentially hostile (though the vicar was pretty pathetic).

So, Thou Shalt Kill wasn’t bad. Cautions for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘To Honour the Dead,’ by John Dean

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Continuing my reading of John Dean’s Inspector Jack Harris series. I don’t love these books, but I guess they’re growing on me. I enjoyed To Honour the Dead.

Jack Harris is a detective in the English Pennine town of Levbridge. He is misanthropic and grumpy, but an effective cop, though a little rough in his methods. (I’m always interested when fictional British cops show aggressive and corner-cutting tendencies. Is the popularity of such stories an indication of public discontent with current real-world policing?)

Remembrance Sunday, the day for honoring the war dead, is approaching, and there’s tension in Levbridge and its neighboring communities. Most of the locals respect those who served, but there are a couple war protestors who promise to disrupt ceremonies. Also somebody has been defacing monuments. Jack Harris finds plenty of people to annoy him in these squabbles – not only the protestors but a local businessman who idolizes his father, who was decorated for service in the Falklands, and seems intent on getting the man’s name on every memorial. Jack is also irritated by a local woman whose son’s recent death was attributed by the coroner to alcohol and freezing weather, but she insists he was murdered, and won’t quit nagging the police about it.

But when a genuine hero – a Victoria Cross winner from World War II, is murdered in his home, Harris and his team soon discover plots and schemes and secrets a-plenty.

Good writing. Interesting (if sometimes annoying) characters. Author Dean is good at misdirection through lies and counterintuitive characterization. Cautions for language, but To Honour the Dead was good entertainment.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Vixen’s Scream,’ by John Dean

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One of the essential problems with the popular subgenre of English Village Police Mysteries is, how many murders can you plausibly set in a small town? You might call it the Midsomer Murders Dilemma. The Vixen’s Scream is only the second in John Dean’s Inspector Jack Harris mysteries, set in the Pennines, so at this point in the series it’s reasonable for our hero to doubt whether a serial killer could be at work in their community, where everybody knows everybody’s business. That doubt will be undermined as the story goes on.

Several “outsiders” have moved into the area (Inspector Harris’ chief subordinate is one of them), and one of the things they need to get used to is the sound of vixens (female foxes) screaming during mating season. The sound is disturbing, almost indistinguishable from the scream of a woman in distress.

One newcomer is a retired London schoolteacher, who keeps badgering the police with reports of women being attacked near her cottage. Inspector Harris, not a patient man, repeatedly informs her that she’s just hearing a vixen’s scream.

Until a young woman is found dead near the teacher’s home, her skull bashed in. And suddenly there are hints that other young women may have been murdered in the area, and Harris has to sort his way through multiple lies and alibis, meanwhile fending off the press, the particular bane of his life.

What I noticed in particular in The Vixen’s Scream was how good the author is at presenting plausible liars. His liars fooled me every time. They provide plenty of misdirection, keeping the puzzle puzzling right to the end.

Pretty good book. No cautions for the reader that I can think of.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl In the Meadow,’ by John Dean

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I found, on looking into our archives, that I have actually read and reviewed previous books in the Inspector Jack Harris series by John Dean (an English writer, not the American Watergate figure). I was ambivalent about the two books I reviewed before – Jack Harris as a character does not entirely please me. Still, the books are okay as stories, and I enjoyed The Girl In the Meadow, number 10 in the series.

Near the English village of Levton Bridge stands Meadowview House, an abandoned country property that has recently been acquired by a wildlife trust. Then a strange man suddenly appears to disrupt the proceedings – he claims to be the unacknowledged natural son of the former owner, with a right to inheritance. This rouses the ire of Inspector Harris, an animal lover who used to play in the house with his friends when he was young.

But it becomes a professional matter for him when workers remodeling the house discover a woman’s skeleton concealed under the floor. The mystery of who this woman is, and the repercussions that follow when she is identified, lend increasing dramatic tension to the plot.

John Dean is a good writer, and the story worked out in ways that kept my interest. I continue less than over the moon about Harris himself as a hero – he is tactless, and his subordinates walk on eggshells in discussions, afraid to contradict him. But I think he’s softened a little from the earlier books in the series. I felt the book contained, like so many police mysteries nowadays, an unnecessary surplus of female cops, but that’s my prejudice.

The Girl In the Meadow was an entertaining book. Not much above minimum literary requirements, but fewer and fewer books are up to that minimum these days. So I recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Hill,’ by John Dean

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Dead Hill

In the previous John Dean novel I read, To Die Alone (reviewed south of here), I came away kind of cool to the main character. Detective Inspector Jack “Hawk” Harris operates in a fictional small town in northern England. He seemed a fairly garden variety literary detective in the Inspector Morse mode – eccentric, poorly socialized, and rude to everyone (including his superior). His chief virtue was his love for animals, especially his black Labrador, Scoot, who accompanies him pretty much everywhere.

In this novel, Dead Hill (actually an earlier installment in the series), I got a better opportunity to know Inspector Harris, and I liked him better. He’s even admirable at times.

A man is found dead at the bottom of a cliff in an old quarry. However (as Harris immediately suspects) the man did not fall by accident. He was struck on the head and pushed, according to the medical examiner. Suspicion falls on a couple of visitors in the area, shady types out to steal the eggs of golden eagles for collectors. But witnesses report a third man with them – though they deny that.

A lot of people are telling lies about a lot of things, and Harris’s investigation leads him back into his own past. Many of the villains in this complex case were fellows he went to school with as a boy – and he himself came within an inch of following on their path. But he didn’t know them as well as he thought he did, and he will see many of his memories and assumptions turned upside down before all is done.

Harris’s moral character is more on display here than in the last book I read, and that improved the story immensely for me. I enjoyed it quite a bit and recommend it. With mild cautions, of course, for language and disturbing themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘To Die Alone,’ by John Dean

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To Die Alone

Without going to all the bother of doing a serious, scientific survey, I get the strong impression that British crime fiction is becoming heavily “Midsomerized” just now. By that I mean that nobody really wants to read about what’s going on in the urban centers, so people are opting for stories about crime in small English communities, where the suspects are generally white and the situations less fraught with political deadfalls.

There are several such series to choose from, and I’ve reviewed books from a few. This time I gave a shot to John Dean’s (not the American Watergate figure) Inspector Harris series. And it wasn’t bad at all.

Jack Harris (his nickname is “Hawk,” but don’t do it without his permission) is a detective chief inspector in the fictional hamlet of Levton Bridge in the northern Pennines region. A former soldier, he’s smart and strong and shrewd. He worked for a time in London, but eagerly took the opportunity to return to the village where he grew up, because his deepest love is for the nature of the region, and for wildlife. Each book in the series, I gather, involves some crime against animals.

In To Die Alone, a man does just what the title suggests. He’s found dead in the woods, possibly struck by a tree in a windstorm, but in fact stabbed to death. Soon after that his dog is found, terribly mauled by some animal, probably another dog. That suggests to Harris a connection to a dog fighting ring which he knows to be operating locally. And that leads to illegal gambling, and the world of exotic animal smuggling. All the time Harris tries to keep his commander (whom he despises) in the dark while directing his two subordinates – a transplanted Cockney who yearns for the bright lights and a callow young female detective.

Jack Harris should have been more annoying to me than he was. I dislike people who care more for animals than humans, and Harris is clearly one of those. However, he isn’t painted as a paragon, and he came off quite sympathetically (most of the time). The writing is very good as well.

Recommended, with mild cautions for the usual suspects.