A Case of Spirits - Peter Lovesey

 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.

Sergeant Verity and the Swell Mob - Francis Selwyn

I happened upon this series by accident but will purposefully seek out more.  Francis Selwyn is a pseudonym of Donald Thomas, poet, prolific author and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University.  His passion appears to be Victorian crime fiction, because as well as the Verity series he has written (as Thomas) the Inspector Swain series (The Ripper's Apprentice sounds right up my street) and currently produces pseudo-Sherlocks.  His latest, Death on a Pale Horse, is due out next month.  As Selwyn he wrote Hitler's Englishman: The Crime of Lord Haw-Haw (1987), which has long been part of my collection and is my go-to research book regarding William Joyce.  Also as Selwyn he produced a book on Neville Heath which I am now looking out for.

Meanwhile, back to Sergeant Verity.  Some might say it is redolent of Peter Lovesey's seminal Sergeant Cribb series, which certainly predate Verity.  I am a great admirer of Cribb, albeit not of Lovesey's later work.  But Selwyn is the more adventurous writer and I enjoyed this, the fifth of the series, for the off-the-wall undercurrent.  Villains with names like Old Mole, Stunning Joseph, and Sealskin Kite are always going to attract me, and I also enjoyed the fact that Verity - wholly unlike Cribb - isn't all that bright.  The chase on the Brighton Parliamentary I thought was superbly done, a complex scenario executed in a genuinely thrilling style.