Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2016 August 12 • Friday

Bill James's Vacuum (2011) is the 28th novel in a remarkable crime series that takes place in an unnamed British city I imagine as being similar to Cardiff. The moral center of this world is Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur and a consistent feature of the series is his dizzying exchanges with his superior officer, the unhinged and demonic Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles.

Technically these are crime novels. Even more technically, they're about half police procedural, half criminal procedural. But the real point of this series is to craft a one massive story in which each volume is a chapter as well as a book that can stand on its own.

In 1976 the prolific James published, under his real name of James Tucker, The Novels of Anthony Powell and I think of the Harpur & Iles series as Bill James's Dance to the Music of Crime.

There's a great deal of wit in these books and the back and forth between Harpur and Iles has a Jeeves & Wooster quality to it at times. But it's a violent, cynical world in which keeping the peace has come to mean preserving a balance of power between the two strongest criminal gangs of drug dealers.

As long as "Panicking" Ralph Ember and Mansel Shale control the drugs trade, cautiously cooperating under an understanding of which areas are their respective turfs, there's no competition, no blood in the streets, no dead bodies on the evening news, no shame cast on the police.

Nature abhors a vacuum and so does Desmond Iles, who's deeply concerned that Shale might be letting down his end of things, inviting some very unfriendly competition.

This is the first line of the novel: "Following that dreadful business when his wife and son were shot dead in the Jaguar, Mansel Shale seemed to decide on very deep changes to his own life".

Losing himself and perhaps trying to find himself in religion, Shale hands over control of his business to his lieutenant, Michael Redvers Arlington. There's understandable concern about this move since Arlington goes back and forth, unpredictably, seamlessly, constantly, between his own identity and personality and that of General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War.

Here's how Arlington responds when Harpur asks him about another member of Shale's gang, a man called Edison.

'And, clearly, Edison is the sort I need beside me when I tackle this damned anarchist, Commie, atheistic, republican rabble government in Madrid, the so-called "Popular Front", with its fucking intrusive Lefty Brit sympathizers,' Arlington said. 'The International Brigade, spouting socialist junk. Have you heard of the Trotskyist George Orwell, so-called? That's not his real name. He's here. I hate people who give themselves false labels. I'm damn proud of my own name — Francisco Franco — amd would never change. Orwell's real name was Blair, so you can see he might want to get rid of it.

The speed with which Arlington changes time, place and identity is genuinely startling and a typically ingenious spin to put on a character. It's this kind of invention and unexpectedness that makes the Harpur & Iles series so unusual and rewarding. It also perhaps limits its readership to those who are definitely not looking for a straightforward, traditional "mystery" or police novel.