The Calleshire Chronicles, also known as the Sloan and Crosby canon, is a series of 24 crime novels by the English author Catherine Aird. The first, The Religious Body ( ISBN0-7451-5709-2), appeared in 1966 and the most recent, Constable Country ( ISBN9780749030759), in 2023.
The Sloan & Crosby series is not to be missed by lovers of a good mystery. The mysteries have a wonderful comic touch, intricate plotting and literate charm.[1]
Christopher Dennis Sloan, known to his colleagues as "Seedy", is a long-suffering detective inspector. Happily married, he grows roses in his (limited) spare time. In each novel he is helped by the hapless Detective Constable William Crosby, a fast-driving but slow-thinking young man avoided by his colleagues: only Sloan's wife Margaret has ever been known to say a good word about him. In each novel Sloan is put under pressure by his immediate superior, the choleric Superintendent Leeyes. The laboured conversations between the two men summarise the plot at regular intervals. The only other three characters who appear regularly are: Dr Dabbe, the lugubrious pathologist; Dyson, the caption-loving police photographer; and traffic division head Inspector "Happy" Harpe, so named because he claims he has never had anything to smile about.
The books, set in a county easily identifiable as Kent, often turn on ecclesiastical matters and show Aird's deep knowledge of canon law.
Footnotes
↑ Moray Council Public Library Newsletter, Review dated 29.4.04
Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—whether professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as speculative fiction and other genre fiction in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained extremely popular, particularly in novels. Some of the most famous heroes of detective fiction include C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Kogoro Akechi, and Hercule Poirot. Juvenile stories featuring The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and The Boxcar Children have also remained in print for several decades.
Ellery Queen is a pseudonym created in 1928 by the American detective fiction writers Frederic Dannay (1905–1982) and Manfred Bennington Lee (1905–1971). It is also the name of their main fictional detective, a mystery writer in New York City who helps his police inspector father solve baffling murder cases. From 1929 to 1971, Dannay and Lee wrote around forty novels and short story collections in which Ellery Queen appears as a character.
Mystery is a fiction genre where the nature of an event, usually a murder or other crime, remains mysterious until the end of the story. Often within a closed circle of suspects, each suspect is usually provided with a credible motive and a reasonable opportunity for committing the crime. The central character is often a detective, who eventually solves the mystery by logical deduction from facts presented to the reader. Some mystery books are non-fiction. Mystery fiction can be detective stories in which the emphasis is on the puzzle or suspense element and its logical solution such as a whodunit. Mystery fiction can be contrasted with hardboiled detective stories, which focus on action and gritty realism.
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Martin Beck is a fictional Swedish police detective and the main character in a series of ten novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, collectively titled The Story of a Crime. Frequently referred to as the Martin Beck stories, all have been adapted into films between 1967 and 1994. Six were adapted for the series featuring Gösta Ekman as Martin Beck.
Detective Inspector G. Lestrade is a fictional character appearing in the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. Lestrade's first appearance was in the first Sherlock Holmes story, the 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet. His last appearance is in the 1924 short story "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs", which is included in the collection The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.
At Bertram's Hotel is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie, first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club on 15 November 1965 and in the United States by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1966. The novel follows Chief Inspector Fred Davy as he investigates an upmarket hotel that is at the centre of a mysterious disappearance. Among the lodgers at the hotel is Christie's popular character Miss Marple; At Bertram's Hotel was marketed as a Miss Marple novel, despite the fact that Marple only appears in a few chapters and has a completely passive role in the investigation.
The Last Detective is a British TV comedy drama series, broadcast on ITV between 7 February 2003 and 31 May 2007, starring Peter Davison as the title character, Detective Constable "Dangerous Davies". The series is based on the "Dangerous Davies" series of novels written by Leslie Thomas, and was filmed in the north London suburbs of Willesden, Neasden and Harlesden.
Waking the Dead is a British television police procedural crime drama series, produced by the BBC, that centres on a fictional London-based cold case unit composed of CID police officers, a psychological profiler and a forensic scientist. A pilot episode aired in September 2000, and a total of nine series followed. Each story is split into two hour-long episodes, shown on consecutive nights on BBC One. A third series episode won an International Emmy Award in 2004. The programme was also shown on BBC America in the United States, though these screenings are edited to allow for advertising breaks, as well as UKTV in Australia and New Zealand and ABC1 in Australia. A total of 46 stories aired across the nine series. The show aired its final episode on 11 April 2011. A spin-off from the series, titled The Body Farm, revolving around forensic scientist Eve Lockhart, was announced by the BBC in January 2011 and ran for just one series.
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Dalziel and Pascoe is a British television crime drama based on the mystery novels of the same name, written by Reginald Hill. The series was first broadcast on 16 March 1996, with Warren Clarke being cast as Dalziel and Colin Buchanan being cast as Pascoe. The series is primarily set in the fictional town of Wetherton in Yorkshire, and "follows the work of two detectives who are thrown together as partners. Complete opposites. Different backgrounds, different beliefs, different styles. They get on each other's nerves. They are continually embarrassed by each other. But their differences make them a stunningly brilliant crime-solving team."
Kinn Hamilton McIntosh, known professionally as Catherine Aird, is an English novelist. She is the author of more than twenty crime fiction novels and several collections of short stories. Her witty, literate, and deftly plotted novels straddle the "cozy" and "police procedural" genres and are somewhat similar in flavour to those of Martha Grimes, Caroline Graham, M. C. Beaton, Margaret Yorke, and Pauline Bell. She was inducted into the prestigious Detection Club in 1981, and is a recipient of the 2015 Cartier Diamond Dagger award.
Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Strange is a fictional character in the television series Inspector Morse, played by James Grout. The character also appears, as a Police Constable and Detective Sergeant, in the prequel series Endeavour, portrayed by Sean Rigby. Although Strange does not appear in every episode of Inspector Morse, he is present in the whole series from beginning to end. He is absent from only a few of the intervening episodes. Strange's first name is never revealed in the Inspector Morse series.
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The amateur detective, or sometimes gentleman detective, is a type of fictional character. He has long been a staple of crime fiction, particularly in detective novels and short stories set in the United Kingdom in the Golden Age. The heroes of these adventures are often members of the British gentry or gentlemen by conduct. They are sometimes contrasted with professional police force detectives from the working classes.
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