{"id":1325,"date":"2005-12-13T00:39:17","date_gmt":"2005-12-13T00:39:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2005\/12\/strange_affair\/"},"modified":"2005-12-13T00:39:17","modified_gmt":"2005-12-13T00:39:17","slug":"strange_affair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/strange_affair\/","title":{"rendered":"Strange Affair"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?t=friday05-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=0330491652&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000ff&#038;bc1=ffffff&#038;npa=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;IS1=1&#038;f=ifr&#038;bg1=ffffff\" width=\"120\" height=\"240\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\" align=\"right\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><br \/>\nIf 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&#8217;re telling, but for future novels in the series.<br \/>\nYour main protagonist is likely to be male, and if he was ever married, he shouldn&#8217;t remain that way for long. That way, he can have a will they\/won&#8217;t they thing with a slightly junior female colleague running through several of the books in your series.<br \/>\nCases will involve friends and family with surprising regularity. In all likelihood, you don&#8217;t know anyone close to you who&#8217;s been murdered. Your detective will have deaths in his immediate family.<br \/>\nThese are just some of the rules to be going along with. I&#8217;ve been reading the fifteenth in the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson and it&#8217;s not too bad, yet not too good. Not too good in the sense that like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/weblog\/archive\/000454.html\">The Summer That Never Was<\/a>, Banks&#8217; close family is involved in the story to far too great an extent. Previously it was a childhood friend who&#8217;d died, this time his brother is involved.<br \/>\nAnd 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&#8217;s looking for him.<br \/>\nAs before, Robinson doesn&#8217;t worry about repeating himself and hammering home some of the plot points in case some readers didn&#8217;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.<br \/>\nBut all said and done, it was an interesting and compulsive story. You wanted to know how it panned out.<br \/>\nRobinson 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&#8217;s spot on &#8211; 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 &#8211; Banks using a phonecard to make a call from a public payphone.<br \/>\nI will, of course, be persevering with the series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}