Synopsis
Collects eleven mystery stories featuring Nottingham's Inspector Charlie Resnick, including "Bird of Paradise," "Confirmation," "Stupendous," and "Dexerity"
Reviews
paper 1-871033-53-5 Fans mourning the news that Last Rites (p. 414) is the last of Harvey's ten peerless novels about Nottingham's Inspector Charlie Resnick have won at least a modest reprieve in these eleven stories, two never before published. Harvey's already won widespread praise for his gritty urban backgrounds, his nice attention to the limits of the law, and his nuanced portraits of no-nonsense, jazz-and-cat-loving Resnick and his mates. The most welcome news here is how sensitive he can be to the differences among the dozens of different crooks who cross Charlie's path, from smirking, irredeemable Nicky Snape in ``Dexterity'' to Grabianski, the burglar who falls for a nun in ``Bird of Paradise,'' to Ray-o Cooke, the slaughterhouse worker who drags his pathetic way through four stories (``She Rote,'' ``Confirmation,'' ``Work,'' ``Stupendous'') in between the two novels (Cutting Edge, Last Rites) he appears in. As his refreshingly candid introduction implies, Harvey's as capable of routine work as the next writer, but even the most pro forma items here, the anecdotal ``Cool Blues'' and ``Slow Burn,'' the surprisingly one-note tone poem to arson, are a-glint with off-speed dialogue and lowlifes you've never imagined before. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
For crime-fiction fans still grieving over Harvey's decision to end his masterful Charlie Resnick series, a reprieve arrives with this collection of the complete Resnick short stories. The 12 stories--all with titles borrowed from tunes recorded by jazz great Charlie Parker--feature not only Resnick and his fellow Nottingham coppers but also many of the supporting characters from the novels. Ray-o Cook, for example, the slightly bent junk-shop operator who appears in both Off Minor (1992) and the series' finale, Last Rites , turns up in four of these stories and again demonstrates Harvey's genius for portraying the British underclass with uncompromising honesty, hard-won empathy, and not a whit of sentimentality. Too often short crime fiction falls prey to the demands of plot--too much mystery, not enough character--but Harvey avoids this snare by focusing, as he does in the novels, on the psyches of his people rather than on who did what. He says in his introduction to the collection that he used the stories (much as Raymond Chandler did his short fiction) as "footnotes to the longer work, testing grounds on which to walk the characters." For the reader, though, these testing grounds are much more than dress rehearsals; although some stories require knowledge of the novels for maximum enjoyment, others function like early episodes of Hill Street Blues: vivid slices of cop life into which we are immersed suddenly, often in medias res, and from which we emerge with a powerful sense of the suffocating sadness of life on the periphery of society. A perfect coda to the most accomplished crime series of the 1990s. Bill Ott
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