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Andrew Taylor discovers some curious fixations in four new British whodunits
A policeman's lot is traditionally not a happy one, and on the evidence here, it is rapidly deteriorating. The Detective is Dead (Macmillan, pounds 14.99) is the 12th novel in Bill James's series featuring Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles. It is business as usual in their unnamed British city: assorted criminals are slavering over the richest prize to be dangled in front of them in years - the control of a drug-dealing empire, open to all takers after a squalid shooting. Two minor villains, way out of their depth, are murdered. Though a grass fingers the culprits, the British legal system bends over backwards to restore them to liberty. Old-fashioned detection no longer gets results and the courts frown on informers' evidence.
ACC Iles has his own idea of modern policing: use the grass as bait and ensure that he and Harpur are on hand to shoot the murderers when they strike at the grass. The morality of this does not trouble the ACC; his interests lie in other areas, notably teenage girls, the younger the better, and the longer poems of Tennyson. But Harpur, himself...