If you fancy yourself as the next Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson or Reginald Hill, there are a few things you really need to know when you start your detective crime series. First of all, you should think of it as a soap opera. You have to lay some clues well ahead of using. Not in the story you’re telling, but for future novels in the series.
Your main protagonist is likely to be male, and if he was ever married, he shouldn’t remain that way for long. That way, he can have a will they/won’t they thing with a slightly junior female colleague running through several of the books in your series.
Cases will involve friends and family with surprising regularity. In all likelihood, you don’t know anyone close to you who’s been murdered. Your detective will have deaths in his immediate family.
These are just some of the rules to be going along with. I’ve been reading the fifteenth in the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson and it’s not too bad, yet not too good. Not too good in the sense that like The Summer That Never Was, Banks’ close family is involved in the story to far too great an extent. Previously it was a childhood friend who’d died, this time his brother is involved.
And the start of the book really annoyed me with Banks supposedly incommunicado lasting something like 150 pages before, with reports of a murder from his patch attracting front page attention, he finally speaks to someone who’s looking for him.
As before, Robinson doesn’t worry about repeating himself and hammering home some of the plot points in case some readers didn’t fully appreciate what was going on the first time. I suppose that makes these books excellent travelling fare, with you perhaps not paying full attention at all times.
But all said and done, it was an interesting and compulsive story. You wanted to know how it panned out.
Robinson resides full time in Canada and can seem a little keen to show the results of some research trips that he obviously makes. Sometimes it’s spot on – this book was written quite a while ago, so a security alert at Kings Cross Station is quite sobering. But occassionally something slips through the net – Banks using a phonecard to make a call from a public payphone.
I will, of course, be persevering with the series.