Bedside Books Number One

So this was standard crime fiction; Peter Robinson's When the Music's Over. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Peter Robinson. He's a competent writer of police procedurals, and his books are all set near where I used to live so I know the geography's right. There's nothing much wrong with his plots, and I never feel, as I do with some other writers, that when I've finished there was a big hole in the storyline which you could drive  a tank through if you only concentrated hard enough. 

I think part of the problem stems from the fact that I've been reading them for a long time and when you read a series of novels like that you tend to get bored with al the details which the author has to put in for new readers even though old readers are aware of them from way back when, It's part of the price you pay for reading a series and I can just about thole it. The lead character is fine (if you're taking him off the page and not from the TV series) and his sometime lover and sidekick is also fine, again with the caveat that you're talking about the book version and not the TV one. (I really dislike the fact though that we are constantly told what music our Inspector hero either has on in the car or chooses to listen to when he gets home at night. This adds nothing to plot and actually after 22 books it adds nothing to the characterisation either. Even if I recognised more than 50% of the quoted tracks, which I don't,  it would add nothing by this stage) 

I couldn't finish the last one which had something to do with stolen farm machinery because there was too much forensic detail about burning and  burnt bodies, and while I can cope with most forensic description, there's something about burnt bodies that I can't take, particularly when graphically described. 

That said for some reason I bought this one, and I can't even remember when or where but I suspect in the Inverness Tescos on yet another trip down or back up the A9. It was OK to pass the time on a road trip I suppose. As I say he's a competent writer; competent plots, competent style. I was a bit uneasy about the story though; well,  it was actually two stories running concurrently. One was about the grooming for sex of vulnerable white girls by Pakistani men and the other was an historical sexual abuse case re-opened  after allegations were made against a celebrity entertainer. 

I can't quite put my finger on why this annoys me so much. No-one wants crime fiction to stay at the Agatha Christie Body in a Library stage. Society has moved on, and crime fiction with it. But this book, although possibly with the worthy motive of bringing such subjects into public debate, with some worthy inter police dialogue to illustrate and underline the problems associated with both types of cases, just read a bit like a rip off. It was Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris and the Rotherham grooming gang in ever so  slightly fictionalised form, and it just read like an easy reach for a writer. I got no feeling that Robinson had researched either subject further than by reading newspaper accounts of the real life prototypes, or given any real thought to the very particular  difficulties in investigating either of these sorts of crimes. And of course both storylines were neatly tied up at the end. Crime fiction is, or can be, a place to discuss all sorts of societal failings, but not the way Robinson does it. It's crime writing by numbers and it's lazy. 

Since I have mentioned en passant the TV series I might add that for me it was doomed to failure the day they cast Stephen Tomkinson as Inspector Banks - nothing wrong with ST per se but he can't do this part; he's just wrong for it. They also made Banks a nasty shouty man, which in the books he isn't, and there seems to be no good reason for that. They changed his sergeant from a feisty independent prickly, but thoughtful, woman who took her job extremely seriously, while tackling demons of her own from a previous life, into a vapid blonde bimbo,  and inserted an extraneous senior female police officer played by Caroline Catz who a) always looks as though she has the weight of the world on her slender shoulders whatever she's in and b) doesn't  convince as a police officer for five minutes. Contrast  this with the senior police officers in Scott and Bailey played by Amelia Bullmore and Pippa Haywood. Totally convincing as police officers because that's what the script makes them; their gender is irrelevant, they are people dong a difficult job and doing it professionally unlike the women in Banks who are women who happen to be police officers. I appreciate that a lot of this is down to scriptwriting and outwith the control of Robinson; I'm not holding him accountable for what TV producers did to his characters. I'm just saying it's a shame. 

And it can be better. Those of us old enough to  remember Tom Wilkinson as Resnick  in the BBC series of the same name know that police series based on good crime writing can be brilliant. It just takes the right actor and  the right scripts based on the right source material; Resnick had all those in spades. It would be good for it to turn up one day on a satellite TV  channel so I could watch it again.