It was a nightmarish-sort of find. A couple of walkers, members of the Berebury Country Footpaths Society, were out for a walk - something of a political occupation, at that, for the society was dedicated to keeping public footpaths open to the public. At any rate, they were walking along through some farmland peaceably enough when a crow flew by and dropped something right in front of them. It turned out to be a human finger. And that was going to be a problem for Berebury's Criminal Investigation Department, headed by Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan. After all, where there's a finger, there is likely to be a human body out there somewhere...
That's the situation which greets the reader in Catherine Aird's Harm's Way, as Sloan and other members of the very small Berebury force in their corner of the fictional county of Calleshire struggle to find that body. It's not going to be as easy as you might think. Harm's Way is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
Catherine Aird has been writing her books, known collectively as the Calleshire Chronicles, about Sloan and his colleagues ever since the mid-1960s; her most recent, I believe, was just published in 2016. Harm's Way first appeared in 1984. There are a few continuing characters through the series, almost all connected to the police and not all inclined to be particularly helpful to Sloan. There is his superior, Superintendent Leeyes, for example, who is a constant nuisance. And Sloan invariably winds up being assisted - if that is the word - by Detective Constable Crosby, who is known behind his back to his colleagues as "the defective constable." Fortunately, Sloan is hard to distract, but the often-comic interplay among the characters make for very entertaining books.
In the case of the human finger dropped by the crow, Inspector Sloan is handed the job of trying to figure out what happened to the rest of the body – for, rather obviously, there must be one somewhere nearby; crows can only carry things for a limited distance. One obvious problem is that there doesn’t seem at first to be anyone missing. But Sloan soon learns of a number of disappearances in the area – people who have simply vanished. There’s a financier who may have made himself scarce because of some very shady dealing, for example. And another man who apparently just packed up and left home to run off to another woman in London. And let’s not forget that once the police would be able to figure out whose body was missing, so to speak, there would still come the bigger questions: who or what might have killed the victim, and why.
All of this is written with Aird's usual leavening of humor and wit. Her books are certainly post-Golden Age in terms of when they were written, but they are most certainly in GA style. And that is a great pleasure for readers of traditional mysteries. Give Harm's Way a try. Most of Aird's books are available as e-books, and I believe there are a lot of them that your used mystery bookseller would be happy to get for you. Catherine Aird is worth the effort.
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