The fourth and final book in Leslie Thomas’ ‘Dangerous Davies’ series (1998’s ‘Dangerous Davies and the Lonely Heart’) ends with the titular character grimly asking his trusty sidekick Mod if he think’s he’s Inspector Morse. It feels like a suitable tone on which to end because it captures a lot of what seems to me to be at the heart of the books, by which I mean that it is mildly amusing and thoroughly mainstream/populist. This is not an observation as pejorative as I might once have meant it, for these days I quite like the idea of sticking two fingers up at the younger version of myself who would have steered wildly clear of ‘mainstream’ or ‘popular’ on a rather simplistic principle. Don’t get me wrong though. I still tend to veer towards the, ahem, Unpopular, and there is certainly a larger part of me that, despite hugely enjoying both Colin Dexter’s books and John Thaw’s depiction in the TV show, would have much preferred Davie’s quip to have gone along the lines of: ‘Who do you think I am? Inspector Charlton?’ Perhaps Inspector Macdonald, Knollis, Littlejohn or Purbright. Or what about Inspector Sloan?

The good Inspector Sloan stars in Catherine Aird’s ‘Calleshire Chronicles’ books that, as with Leslie Thomas’, have been something of an outlier for me in that the first of the 28 book series was published in 1966 and the last in 2023 just a year before her death at the grand age of 94. For the sake of argument then Aird is about as contemporary in terms of detective fiction writing as I’m likely to get, and whilst I’ll hold back on offering up any opinions on the Calleshire books from the 21st Century until I finally (hopefully, eventually) get to them, I must say that the first nine (published 1966 to 1980) have gone down a treat. Unusually, perhaps, for I now see that Aird is commonly described as being in the accursed ‘cozy’ style and compared to the likes of Caroline Graham and M.C. Beaton. The Graham comparison holds water, I think, for the combination of Inspector Sloan and his somewhat hapless sidekick Detective Constable Crosby are similar in many respects to Inspector Barnaby and Sergeant Troy. Neither, however, seem to me to be particularly ‘cozy’ except in so far as both are good to curl up with in front of the fire on an autumnal evening. And yes, yes, I know that in some respects this is the very definition of ‘cozy’, but if that were truly the case then we might as well describe Georges Simenon as ‘cozy’. Or Dostoyevsky.

M.C. Beaton on the other hand has always seemed to me to be of the calculatedly ‘cozy’ school, perhaps even its originator. I know the Agatha Raisin books have a multitude of fans and that is fine, but I have tried and singularly failed to find much of interest there. Certainly Beaton is better than every other determinedly ‘cozy’ crime writer published this century, immeasurably so in many cases, but her books are not for me. Catherine Aird’s on the other hand have found me eagerly picking up the next in the series, with the first six rattling off my ‘to be read’ pile in rapid succession and the next three doing similarly after a pause for the ‘Dangerous Davies’ books and a stylistic detour into Lettice Coopers epic ‘National Provincial’. Indeed it was Aird’s books that led me to Thomas’ thanks to some reference in an article about the Calleshire Chronicles, the details of which escape me for the moment, but that might well have been along the lines of how Detective Constable Crosby might easily be described as ‘The Last Detective’. Certainly in the first few books much is made of Inspector Sloan finding himself in the position of being unable to have his preferred colleagues supporting him on his cases and how Crosby is, literally, the last detective available. It’s all gently humorous and even as the series progresses and Crosby begins to show small signs of intelligent detective process (by the ninth book he is starting to show a few faint shoots of promise though these are still vastly overshadowed by his ability and propensity to drive cars very fast) there are still asides along the lines of his being a bit of a bumbling Watson to Sloan’s Holmes.

The fictional county of Calleshire is apparently based on Kent, but I suspect anyone familiar with the area might struggle to really recognise the landscape in the books. Regular Unpopular readers will know I am a big fan of detective novels that successfully conjure real landscapes (George Bellairs’ evocations of the Isle of Man and Caroline Rivett’s depictions of the Lunesdale landscapes especially spring to mind) but it equally doesn’t particularly bother me when this is not the case. Aird instead is skilled in using the Kentish environs to conjure a sense of place that feels almost universal, one that exists somewhere in the liminal imaginative space between county town, suburban sprawl and rural (relative) solitude. As often with such imaginative landscapes, city existence rears its head in the reality of London as an entity that defies fictionalisation. If ‘Calleshire’ then might translate as ‘Anywhere’ then the historical context of the books also rather escapes the gravity of reality. Despite being first published at the height of Swinging London when Britannia’s Popular Culture ruled the waves, there is little if anything in Aird’s debut ‘The Religious Body’ that evokes the era. Indeed the popular image of that particular point in time is neatly sidestepped by having the book set in a convent, where language and customs might be seen to be intentionally obfuscating as a means not only of aligning with a set of religious beliefs but also as a way of rejecting those of the secular world. It’s the navigation of these two parallel worlds that makes the book so appealing, I think, and Aird echoes most readers’ difficulties in this with Inspector Sloan’s own struggles to not only solve the crime but also to make sense of convent life. It’s a fine debut novel and really does set the tone and formula for the following books, all of which feel similarly rootless in terms of time and place whilst also putting out just enough tendrils to reality to feel grounded and entirely relatable. Aird does this best through her sketching of character, which she does with an assured lightness of touch, and the dialogue between them which is deftly drawn. There are elements of the locked room mystery and the book is certainly a fine example of the ‘play fair’ approach which should find favour with the puzzle solving addicts, but thankfully none of this overpowers the nicely paced narrative. The denouement is well constructed and although fans of police procedurals (of which the Calleshire Chronicles are arguably also an example) might find it all a little flimsy in terms of deductive processes, Aird strikes an excellent balance.

The second book of the series, ‘Henrietta Who?’, followed in 1968 and for me is by a nose the best of the first nine. Like the other eight it very much follows the formula set down in ‘The Religious Body’ in terms of the relationships between the police characters (notably Sloan and Crosby of course, but also the amusingly bumptious Superintendent Leeyes) and the general structure of the mystery. All good genre novels to some extent follow formulas of course and this is one of their strengths (or weaknesses if you want to be foolishly critical). In both ‘The Religious Body’ and ‘Henrietta Who?’ Aird perhaps takes a step too far in this direction when she has Inspector Sloan employ the same strategy of setting up a trap to ensnare the murderer. The plotting trick works well in both cases but Aird wisely backs away from making it A Thing (as I suspect she may initially have been tempted to do) and does not continue to utilise it. What she does continue to do is to create a space that is at once recognisable and yet also comfortably and obviously fictional.

Aird’s writing is certainly in the conservative tradition (which perhaps translates in more modern idiom as that dreaded epithet ‘cozy’) but this ought not to be something that one automatically aligns to those of an, ahem, ‘reforming’ ideology in the present. If anything the reading of what might be seen as traditionally conservative texts from the mid to later 20th Century (Aird’s third book ‘The Stately Home Mystery’ makes this explicit connection in a quietly provocative manner) can often show just how polarised the 21st Century has become in many (all?) ways. Certainly in the first nine books of the ‘Calleshire Chronicles’ we find Aird softly interrogating themes like identity, class, age and religion without ever taking either a Populist, Revisionist or Revolutionary stance. Not that Aird can help making little digs and many of these have made me, if not laugh out loud then at least chuckle inwardly. In ‘His Burial Too’ Sloan reflects that “He had once been on a Management Course and had returned permanently confused about aims and objects”, whilst with respect to two female characters she notes that “each felt superior to the other—Mrs Turvey because she had been married; Miss Holroyd because she had been educated.” Meanwhile, in ‘Slight Mourning’ Sloan considers that “The trouble with people who said what they thought was that they didn’t always think a lot”, an observation that is, sadly, eternally true.

I admit that I am intrigued to see what Aird (and/or Inspector Sloan) makes of the latter 20th and early 21st Centuries as the Calleshire Chronicles continue to unfold. Will the ‘reality’ of history contemporaneous to each book’s date of publication continue to hover just outside the field of visual perception or will it impinge more as time goes on? In 1979’s ‘Some Die Eloquent’, with the spectre of Thatcher’s neo-liberal economic experiment looming on the horizon Aird has the Deputy Head of a school (Private, girls of course) suggest that Economics is merely “an ill-defined grey area which [knows] no morality, somewhere between geography and history” whilst Sloan and his trusted Police Surgeon Dr Dabbe acknowledge the beginnings (in the context of the removal of the property qualification for jury service in 1974) of a mistrust of ‘experts’. The space that Aird paints in her Chronicles then might certainly be conservative, but it is arguably far from Conservative. I’m certainly looking forward to exploring it more in the coming months.