I remember when Sergeant Cribb first graced our TV screens in the mid 1970s. We'd been introduced to Victorian detectives by The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes but this was something different - a newly written Victorian detective in a wholly credible Victorian world but written by a young man fully conscious of contemporary sensibilities. And written, moreover, with wit.
Lovesey's specialism was the Victorian fad - competitive walking or 'wobbling', waxworks and the chamber of horrors, fear of dynamiters, and in this instance Parapsychology. He offers a fictional body, the Life After Death Society (LADS) but the members are highly reminiscent of the real-life Society for Psychical Research. The mediums are all frauds and at heart everyone knows it. But then one is murdered in the house of a prominent medical man in the presence of both Cribb and Inspector Jowett.
It's all great fun. The Cribb books are all classics and should be much higher profile than they are. After he ceased writing them Lovesey wrote two other novels which I enjoyed, The False Inspector Dew and Keystone, but I'm afraid I never took to his other long-running series featuring Peter Diamond. I might however try his Prince of Wales series and the novels he wrote as Peter Lear sound interesting.
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