Roses, Roses (Crime Case) [Hardcover]

Don't let any of that stop you from reading "Roses, Roses" anyway.

This novel is the first one in Bill James's Harpur & Iles series that I personally have read. Several have gone before, revealing the tangled lives of these people; Harpur, a womanizer of legendary proportions and a good policeman, and Iles, whose wife was at some point in the past one of Harpur's conquests. It's like a huge intermarried family, this series of characters. Everyone's related to someone else and all their lives touch - usually at sensitive and painful points.

This novel was recommended to me on Amazon based on my affection for the aforementioned P. D. James and Ian Rankin, and I must say it - and its author - deserve to be included in the ranks of such premier English mystery writers.

The plot you can get a summary of here at Amazon.com. My impressions, however, you get here. Nobody's sugared up or perfected in this book. Everyone's got dirty hands - and not just the detectives, but their spouses and their grasses and everyone else, except possibly Harpur's two daughters, who are well on their way to jaded viewpoints produced courtesy of seeing what their father does for a living. What the reader gets is a stimulating collection of street-wise characters who are way too human - perhaps even repellant at times - but who never leave a false note hanging in the air. The author has a clean, stripped-down narrative style that eschews unnecessary detail and keeps the pace tight in the right places at all times.

I disagree with the prior reviewer that the flashbacks to Harpur's wife, Megan, during her last hours and before that, as she makes her illicit trips to London to meet with her lover and Harpur's ex-partner, don't work. They do. You get present and past seamlessly woven together; one fleshes out the other, each makes the other more understandable. When you're with Megan in that dark car park at 2 AM, just moments before her grisly death, voyeuristically watching her mental acrobatics as she attempts to figure out how to deal with the shadowy figure lurking close by while examining the past with her lover and slowly puting together the realization that something might be dreadfully wrong, the suspense morphs into a genuine sympathy for a character who might all too easily be dismissed by the phrase "she got what was coming to her".

I'm going to go back & read James' entire Harpur & Iles series, form beginning to end. If "Roses, Roses" is any example of what I'll find when I do, I'll be a highly delighted and satisfied reader well into the year 2002.

If you're looking for a mystery series - and a set of characters - whose uniqueness, blend and taste are not only enjoyable but DIFFERENT, I suggest you run, don't walk, to Bill James's Harpur & Iles series.

Compared to previous books in this series, it all feels like something the cat dragged in.

Unfortunately, the characters themselves, although well-realized, are completely unsympathetic, which made it very difficult to feel for any of them. Even the stiff way Harpur's daughters speak seem entirely unconvincing, although maybe this is because I'm unfamiliar with certain British idioms. But if this is British wit then I think I'll stick with the American brand!

Finally, the plot itself still has me a bit confused as to motive.

The really big question here is why so many gifted British mystery writers have such a cynical, cold view of the world these days. Perhaps it relates to what British columnist Jeremy Paxman has to say in his book, "The English" - The English feel they are doomed. "Roses, roses" provides a splendid example of this.