Back in 1983 or so I said to myself that summer was the time for doing things and winter the time for writing about them. More than four decades later I still seem to be living pretty much by the same excuse, except that in 2025 it is less writing about what I did in the summer months and more about what I read. On her entertaining ‘Adventures in reading, running and working from home’ blog Liz Dexter has had a decade long series of posts covering ’20 books of summer’. This year was a theme of ‘get those hardbacks off the shelves’ and covered an intriguingly diverse range of titles, some of which I have already read and some which I’ve since added to my own ’to be read’ shelves/piles/digital libraries. It would be a good exercise to try and do next summer, although I dare say that when May 2026 comes around I shall be too focused on getting out on my bicycle and visiting the beach to actually do anything about it. Not that I stopped reading during the months of May, June, July, August and September of course, just that from around the middle of June I stopped writing about most of them.

Did I read much in the summer of 1983? Cycling Weekly and Autosport magazines perhaps. Books? Not so much that I can remember. I do however have a vague recollection that some of my friends were enjoying Leslie Thomas’ ‘Virgin Soldiers’ books from the 1960s and ‘70s and that I rather turned my nose up at them (the books, not the friends). I just read a synopsis of the titular 1966 novel and nothing about it appeals to me in the slightest now either, although I can see why the themes of sex, war and male camaraderie conveyed in a supposedly comedic style might have appealed to some. The very idea still makes me shudder, however.

What I had not realised until now was that the the naughties TV show ‘The Last Detective’ starring Peter Davidson and Sean Hughes was based on another series of books by Leslie Thomas, this time the ‘Dangerous Davies’ stories. Have I ever watched the show? No. Will I ever watch the show? Perhaps. I have a DVD boxset that might provide some light entertainment on gloomy winter days when I tire of old episodes of ‘Midsomer Murders’ and Zooey our ageing cat requires her afternoon cuddle in front of the fire. I have however, now read the ‘Dangerous Davies’ novels and these four books, originally published between 1976 and 1998, were the last four completed in what might have been my own ’40 or so books of summer’ programme.

Regular Unpopular readers, if such a thing exists, will likely have already noted that the books are to a degree anomalies in terms of my reading tastes in that, whilst they certainly seem to be examples of detective fiction they are remarkably ‘modern’ (for which read ‘written after the mid 20th Century’). Certainly they are somewhat unusual in having been written and published within my own lifetime and are set within a timeframe that I remember. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons that I struggled with them to an extent. On the level of light entertainment, which arguably is the only level on which to judge them, they are fine. Good, even. They rattle along at a decent pace and the characters are pretty well drawn. They are, as they say, ‘page turners’. The comedic style is of a much lighter touch than I expected given the cover blurbs’ insistence that the books are ‘richly humorous’ and that is certainly a point in their favour, particularly for those who, like me, rarely find comedy funny. There is too a degree of Thomas disguising darkness with lightness, particularly with respect to the crime at the core of the first book. Agatha Christie does this so well in her Miss Marple stories, often obscuring deeply disturbing themes with the patina of comfortable old age and middle class environs. Thomas attempts a similar trick, this time with an air of world-weary bonhomie and gentle cynicism, though the settings are much more resolutely urban and working class (all the books are set predominantly in the London borough of Willesden). The books are certainly pungently evocative of their times and do rather read like period sitcoms, which is not altogether a ringing endorsement, it should be said. For whilst many pieces of period fiction (detective or otherwise) from the early to mid 20th Century necessarily contain aspects of the deeply rooted sexism and racism of their contexts, it very seldom seems to permeate their entirety. These ‘Dangerous Davies’ books, by comparison, feel much more obviously coloured by such social contexts and if Thomas tackles some of the themes of class, race and gender expectations with admirable intent, it often comes over as a little cringeworthy. One gets the feeling that Thomas is trying too hard, or not trying hard enough. It’s hard to decide which.

This is perhaps a little harsh because, as I say, I kept turning the pages and kept picking up the next book. Would I have continued if there were more than four books in the series? Maybe, maybe not, although it is of course a moot point. And have they made me want to read Thomas’ ‘Virgin Soldiers’ books some forty five years after snootily dismissing them as mainstream airport paperback rubbish? Of course not. Because whilst one of the most enjoyable aspects of getting older is to gleefully flick the finger to one’s younger self, paradoxically another pleasure is to be found in fiercely upholding some of those increasingly ancient opinions.