Kill Me - Hardcover

Penzler Pick, June 2000: Like John Harvey and Ian Rankin, Bill James is one of the modern masters of the gritty English police procedural. More bruised and bloody than Reginald Hill's equally recommended Dalziel and Pascoe series (also set in the north of England), James's books, featuring the tag team of Colin Harpur and Desmond Iles, require a reader's sharpest attention. The characters are so familiar to each other and their milieu, and even the inevitable villains, that the dialogue and plotting often appear to be encoded in a language with its own set of meanings.

For example, here are the two hard-working provincial cops, Assistant Chief Constable Iles and Detective Chief Superintendent Harpur, in the process of briefing a young policewoman, Naomi Anstruther, on some of their targeted bad guys just before an upcoming undercover raid:

"Here's the one they call Lovely Mover," Iles replied, a photograph displayed for her in each of his hands. "Delightful clothing on supple limbs. Lincoln W. Lincoln, who came on ahead of the other two to our region. Pathfinder. Explorer. Business emissary. Carries the automatic in a left-mounted shoulder holster under this gorgeous, generously cut jacket. Yes, probably did one of your predecessors as queen of the Eton bar--Eleri, that lovely old rogue. Might have done Si Pilgrim, too, though we don't have LWL down as a throat guru. Perhaps he's been on a course lately.

In other words, Lincoln is a well-dressed thug whose known m.o. doesn't involve throat cutting when it comes to dispatching rivals; he's set up a base of illegal operations inside their territory. Meanwhile, listening to his superior officer, Harpur is occupied with fitting Naomi for her full-body armor, needed for the evening's sure-to-be-violent activities. Although nothing about the night's events is likely to be remotely amusing, the setting is a popular floating restaurant with a cheerful name, the Eton Boating Song. What happens as the operation gets underway could never have been anticipated: Naomi is spotted by two former boyfriends who have no idea she's gone undercover. It's a rotten break for them: they get in the way and die as a result of being in the wrong place at the worst time.

This fiasco is only the beginning. As Kill Me unfolds, the idea of revenge is much bruited about, especially because the forces of police justice fail to nab the killers. James demonstrates again that there's nothing unsubtle about serious police work, as Naomi's bosses both make their way through the intricacies of the case while paying close attention to her stability. Bill James is an admittedly acquired taste that, like a great single-malt Scotch, is worth a little extra effort to acquire. --Otto Penzler

With the publication of Kill Me in paperback...there are now seventeen books in the Harpur and Iles series. I publish one a year and very occasionally two. The next, Pay Days, comes out in hardback in 2001 in the UK and the US. I had no idea when I started in the mid-1980s that the series would run to this number. I won't say, as some authors do, that the characters took over. But having established my pair, I'm reluctant to waste them, in any sense. I'll probably go to at least twenty.

They are two high-ranking police officers. Harpur, the main figure by a whisker, is a detective chief superintendent, and Iles, his boss, an Assistant Chief Constable. In an unnamed English city, they fight organized crime—mainly drug dealing—through their own, not always wholly legal methods. In particular, Iles's unspoken work philosophy is 'the end justifies the means'. He is believed to have murdered two villains who got off in court after killing an undercover detective (see Halo Parade). This episode constantly recurs in his thinking (see In Good Hands and Eton Crop). Neither he nor Harpur is on the take, but they'll do almost anything to put away some of those they believe crooked (and whom the reader knows are crooked): only some—Iles runs alliances with a few Mr. Bigs for the sake of peace on the street, to the nattering despair of his Chief. Harpur does try to control Iles's savagery now and then, without notable success. Harpur's moral authority over Iles is flimsy, not just because he is lower in rank, but because he has had an affair with Iles's wife, and Iles knows it.

My aim in these books is to humanize as much as I can both crooks and cops: that is, to give them full characterization, not put them in roles as representatives of evil and good. This can bring them very close on the ethical scale and, I hope, produces good suspense and, above all, much not necessarily comfortable laughter. The reviewers who please me most find the books not only taut but funny.—Bill James