Free Crime at Christmas by Jack Adrian (ed) Page B

Sergeant Cribb.
    The first Cribb case, Wobble To Death (1970), won the Macmillan best first
novel contest and has much to answer for, since it was almost certainly
responsible for the positive plague of Victorian sleuths with which the 1970s,
in retrospect, seem infested (although Arthur Swinson's popular Sergeant Cork
television series and subsequent books did precede). There were times during
that decade when it seemed that no one was writing a detective story not set
sometime during the nineteenth century (and if writers weren't busy doing that
they were dashing off Sherlock Holmes pastiches, which I suppose comes to the
same thing). Some were good, some were not so good; some were downright
dangerous to the blood pressure because their authors went to such insane
lengths to get their dialogue exactly right for the period that, unless you
happened to have a slang dictionary at your elbow, they might just as well have
been writing in Martian.
    Lovesey didn't go to those extremes and his Sergeant Cribb books are
enjoyable enough without ever reaching the heights of ingenuity and gamey
realism of Francis Selwyn's (i.e. Donald Thomas's) Sergeant Verity novels or
the hilariously bawdy and inventive depths plumbed in the Jeremy Sturrock (a.k.a.
Ben Healey) saga.
    Lovesey's 1978 Cribb offering Waxwork gained the British CWA Silver Dagger and probably
he thought that was a decent note to end on because there's been no Cribb
since. Cribb fans doubtless mourned and the smart money was probably on the old
writer's saw that if you have a good thing going, stick at it, else disaster
will inevitably befall. But I think Lovesey did well to throw off his shackles.
I'll reword that. I know Lovesey did well to throw off his shackles. His post-Cribb novels, without
exception, are wonderfully imaginative, wonderfully readable, wonderfully eccentric.
    In The False
Inspector Dew (1982) an errant dentist who fails to kill his wife
is mistaken for the man who collared Crippen and forced to solve a murder on
the Mauretania. This delightful tour de force quite rightly went
one better than his previous book and won the CWA Golden Dagger. In Keystone (1983) a failed,
destitute, stubbornly sobersided British music-hall comedian is grudgingly
taken on as an extra by Mack Sennett and becomes embroiled in the desperate
schemes of a murderous Mr X who kidnaps the worst actress in Hollywood. In Rough Cider (1986) a crippled
college lecturer is mercilessly badgered by an appalling American female
student into trying to unravel a 25-year-old murder in which he was unwittingly
involved.
    Lovesey's short stories are just as entertaining, just as inventive, just
as twisty. Butchers (1985) was as
dazzling a box of tricks as I've been fooled by in a long time. Here's a neat
little tale with a snap to it that will surely appear in his next collection. .
.

 
     
     
     

 
    A MONG all the children hanging around the department, this one was
definitely the most persistently bothersome. Even now, she was tugging at
Pauline's sleeve.
    'Hey,
miss.'
    'What is it
now?'
    'Something's
up with Santa.'
    'That's
quite enough from you, young lady,' Pauline said sharply—unseasonably sharply
for Christmas week in an Oxford Street department store.
    The Toy
Fair was a bedlam of electric trains, robots, talking dolls, and whining infants,
but the counter staff, however hard-pressed they might be feeling, weren't
expected to threaten the kids.
    The day had
got off to a distinctly trying start when a boy with mischief in mind had
pulled a panda off the shelf and started an avalanche of soft toys. Pauline had
found herself wading knee-deep in teddies, rabbits, and hippos.
    Now she was
desperately trying to reassemble the display, between attending to customers
and coping with little nuisances like this one, dumped in the department while
their parents went off and shopped elsewhere in the store.
    'Take a
butcher's in the grotto, miss.'
    Pauline
glared at the girl, a six-year-old