Tag Archives: Roper and Hooley

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Exploding Shop,’ by Michael Leese

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I have reached the fourth and final volume of the set of Hooley and Roper mysteries I acquired. I’ve got no major complaints to make about The Case of the Exploding Shop, but I can’t praise it very highly either.

Just to remind you, Brian Hooley and Jonathan Roper are London police detectives. The gimmick of the series is that Roper is on the autism spectrum. He’s brilliant at analysis, but other cops resent his tactlessness. Hooley is an easygoing sort who manages to get along with him, profiting from his investigative insights. Their current friction rises from the fact that Roper has noticed (correctly) signs of incipient heart disease in Hooley, and is nagging him to eat better and get more exercise.

During a single morning, a world-famous computer mogul is severely burned by a bomb detonated while he’s making a presentation on a new product. Then an Italian politician visiting London is murdered with a shotgun. And a bomb kills a number of shoppers at a fashionable Sloan Square boutique.

Hooley and Roper go to work, assisted now by a new female team member.

I guess, when I pick up a story about an autistic detective, I’m always looking for something along the lines of Monk on TV. Hooley and Roper are just not as much fun (at least to me). Roper’s value is now pretty well acknowledged on the Force, so there’s not a lot of office opposition. Roper, we are told, has been working on his social skills as well. I’m happy for him, but it makes the story less interesting.

Another thing that didn’t work well for me is Roper’s “rainbow spectrum,” a mental filing and classification system he uses to organize his thinking on complex problems. It’s a useful fictional device, I guess, but it’s also a sort of a black box – the reader can’t follow the logical process. That, I think, sacrifices intrigue.

Also, I’d like to see Hooley have more of a life off the job. Give him a girlfriend or something.

I didn’t hate The Case of the Exploding Shop, but it didn’t raise my pulse rate either. No major cautions for language or subject matter are called for.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Dirty Bomb,’ by Michael Leese

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I’ll say at the outset that I do not love the Roper-Hooley detective series, set in London. I don’t hate the books; I just have no problem putting them down. But I bought a set of four (got them for free, actually), they are readable, and times are tough, so I’m reading them.

In The Case of the Dirty Bomb, brilliant autistic detective Jonathan Roper is back at headquarters, having completed his time with a national security agency. But his partner Brian Hooley is concerned about him. He seems to have lost his way; he’s having trouble analyzing information and is worried he’s “losing it.”

With Hooley’s help, he changes his approach and soon realizes the reason he’s been having trouble. They’re facing an unprecedented problem. Someone is gathering fissionable nuclear material cached in secret locations across Europe and smuggling it into England to set up the extortion scheme to end all extortion schemes.

There’s nothing all that wrong with these books; they simply don’t ring my bells very loudly. The autistic character, Jonathan Roper, is really the most interesting one here. I guess that’s not surprising; he is the “exotic.” But the others could have been made more colorful, in my view. I didn’t find myself caring about them a lot.

Toward the end, the author takes an opportunity to make a dig at anti-Communists, but the political side wasn’t really intrusive. One Russian character’s name was inconsistently spelled. The book was okay, though, though I thought the plot a little far-fetched. Maybe you’ll like it better than I did.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Missing Faces,’ by Michael Leese

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I’m not a huge fan of the Roper and Hooley autism/police procedural series, written by Michael Leese. I find the whole concept of autism fascinating (being on the spectrum myself, I strongly suspect). But I find Jonathan Roper, the autistic English detective in this series, somewhat annoying to read about (which is probably just authorial verisimilitude). Still, the writing isn’t bad, and I bought a set of four books, so I carry on.

Shortly after The Case of the Missing Faces opens with a horrific murder, London detective Brian Hooley is reunited with his partner Jonathan Roper. Roper has been reassigned to a high security national intelligence facility. It’s a center of geekery, full of young geniuses and computer experts, most of them on the autism spectrum themselves, so it was assumed Roper would fit right in. And he did at first, becoming something of a star for his unorthodox but fruitful logical processes. Only lately he’s been having trouble. The official opinion is that maybe he needs the influence of Hooley, with whom he’s comfortable, and with whom he’s worked successfully in the past. So Hooley gets reassigned, and for a change he’s the one who doesn’t fit in.

For a while Roper stays stuck in spite of Hooley’s arrival. He’s certain there’s something important happening that he just can’t see. Something sinister.

Meanwhile, back in London, their colleagues are investigating the deaths of a couple computer experts found murdered in bizarre circumstances, their faces flayed off.

Once Roper realizes that these crimes have to do with national security, he’ll begin to see what’s really going on. But can he figure it all out before he himself falls victim to a brilliant but increasingly unstable serial killer?

I’m not in love with this series, but The Case of the Missing Faces kept me reading. There’s a twist at the end I saw coming pretty far off. There were some conventional references to the dangers of extreme right-wing groups in the US, but (spoiler alert) they came to nothing, so the book wasn’t very political in the end.

I’ll keep reading the series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Headless Billionaire,’ by Michael Leese

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Roper’s memory had cinematic qualities. He could call up the past and watch it like a TV show. If that wasn’t astonishing enough, he had also revealed another factor. His recall mirrored the technology of the moment. This meant his early memories appeared as if on a VHS tape, while the more recent ones were in digital format. Hooley had once speculated that had Roper been born a hundred years earlier his memories would have been on a flickering black-and-white film reel.

A standard scene in a detective mystery – if it’s not a plain police procedural (a very good thing of another kind) – calls for the master sleuth to stand in a room surrounded by lesser men, as he sees things they don’t see and makes mental connections they can’t make. They often think he’s crazy, until he explains his deductions. From Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot to Monk, this has been a set piece.

So it wasn’t much of a jump, once we became aware of the existence of autistic savants, to come up with an autistic detective. I’ve encountered several examples. Jonathan Roper, hero of Michael Leese’s The Case of the Headless Billionaire, is one of them, and it’s not a bad effort.

When a billionaire philanthropist disappears, Chief Inspector Brian Hooley is assigned to the case. The man vanished into a London crowd in broad daylight, and the police are baffled. Considering the difficulty of the case, Insp. Hooley asks to get Jonathan Roper assigned to assist. Roper is on suspension, having nearly ruined an earlier investigation through his artless honesty. Roper is on the autistic spectrum, and other detectives find him hard to work with. But Hooley has always gotten along with him, managing to adjust to his eccentricities. He treats him as a sort of substitute son.

Roper is the right man for the job. In his time off, he’s been working on his social skills, and he’s learning to ask for explanations of “normal” behavior. He’s also constructing a new way of organizing his own memories, making his deductions more efficient.

Their investigations will lead to corruption in the medical research field, and to human smugglers (human smugglers sure show up in a lot of stories these days. I wish the authorities paid as much attention to them as authors do). The detectives’ lives, as well as those of many innocents, will hang on the efficiency of Jonathan Roper’s remarkable brain.

I liked The Case of the Headless Billionaire. The writing wasn’t bad, and the characters were okay. I won’t say this was a masterful book, but it did the job it set out to do, and I was interested in Hooley and Roper. The issue of fetal stem cell research played a part in the story, but it was framed in a way that sidestepped the controversial issue of whether it’s morally acceptable in the first place.

Worth reading.

[Note: I discover, on searching our files, that I reviewed this book once before under its previous title, Going Underground. I’m surprised I didn’t recognize it, and can only attribute this to old age. But I liked it better this time around.]