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Gently Does It
The Inspector George Gently Case Files – Book I

By Alan Hunter
       


     
Beginning in 1955 Alan Hunter wrote a series of forty-six novels about Chief Inspector George Gently. Now a BBC TV series has been made from the books, Robinson has taken the opportunity of the current interest in the books to reprint them. Viewers might be surprised by the fact that the series is set in Norfolk, not Newcastle, and that if you start at the beginning the books are about life in the 1950s instead of the 1960s and Gently is minus his sidekick. This first case has him enjoying a peaceful vacation, until a local timber merchant is murdered. Everybody thinks his son must be the culprit as it is common knowledge that the two were estranged, but Gently knows better. What is going to be difficult for him, a Scotland Yard detective on vacation in a strange place is getting the local police to believe him.

When reviewing any reprinted series, the main question I have to ask myself is: what does it have to offer to the modern reader? The TV show has been extensively made over to appeal to modern tastes, but this is the first book from fifty-five years ago. Part of its charm lies in that it offers a look into the past, not that of a historical novel that has been, like the show, tweaked to provide what contemporary readers want to read about but in that it was actually written back then. It gives a tangible picture of a shabby, slow-moving place recovering from post-war austerity when a successful timber merchant had three servants, women were sidelined and forensics a long way in the future. No DNA testing for Gently and his colleagues, but plenty of police work and using, in his case anyway, his brain and intuition. Perhaps rather off-putting initially is the author’s terse note that this is a novel about police work rather than a whodunit but as there is more than one suspect don’t let it put you off as it is not exactly true. Nobody writes such a long series of books about mere detecting methods, and this one is surely no different. It is a short book, filled nicely with a linear but compelling tale sure to appeal to any fans of police procedurals and as gentle as the protagonist’s name but none the worse for that. In the absence of shock tactics, what remains is just a good story, which is, for this reader weary of the modern vogue for gimmicks in fiction, a rare treat. One to be savored rather like Gently’s interminable peppermint creams and just think, there are forty-five more of them!


The Book

Robinson (Constable and Robinson)
29 August 2010
Paperback
1849014981 / 9781849014984
Historical Mystery / 1955 Norfolk, England
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Excerpt
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The Reviewer

Rachel A Hyde
Reviewed 2010
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