A new ‘Inspector’ for me … Hooking on to Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse …

Read all Inspector Banks novels … Inspector Rebus done, too … done with Wallander too … Inspector Beck, well, only 10 of them and I am still waiting for some more … I felt like I cleared all backlogs and was now facing long empty days with nothing to read … I searched and found a lot of ‘Inspectors’ … read one Inspector Montalbano novel which failed to grip me … searched among the Inspectors from Great Britain and decided to try Inspector Morse … I read about the Inspector Morse series on the www and what I read sounded good …

And only 13 novels in the series! … aah … why not … and made into a TV series too … and quite interestingly all the above Inspectors have their TV avatars too …  amazon to the rescue again and to my delight and chagrin, found all 13 novels on its used books portals … I realized I was doomed … so, Jai, no searching and waiting and hunting pleasure here, eh, like those Inspector Beck novels … I checked the prices … five were available for 70 each, one for 65, one for 45, and two for 35, and three went slightly above 100!!  This was great going and all books were available with one seller, except one novel … and at this point I didn’t want to hesitate and procrastinate and bought all of them in two instalments …  

The novels were written between 1975 and 1999 and it is only I who discovered them 40 years later … so the period feel is there … and everything appears steady … and one starts to wonder how they ever managed without mobile phones and the Internet!!  And Inspector Morse is an ardent beer lover and he is found in pubs most of the times and actually, all these other ‘British’ Inspectors too love their pints and malts … and now I know why I feel so thirsty while reading Robinson or Rankin and now Dexter … and when I started reading from the first in the series, I discovered soon enough that the Morse series is not a ‘police procedural’ as I anticipated … that was a bit of a blow … Morse is an ‘Inspector’ and he works from the police station, and he has a ‘sidekick,’ Sergeant Lewis … that is all the ‘police’ that is there … the collecting of evidence, forensics, post mortems, and other ‘procedural’ matters all happen ‘behind the scenes’ … Morse thinks and talks to the key witnesses and basically ‘works out’ the case … and goes to the pub for beer on a regular basis … so, what I realized was that Morse was a ‘lone-ranger’ detective who happened to be working in the police force …  

I have already read four of the ‘Inspector Morse’ novels, and he is very cerebral and smart … and I am glad that I put behind my slight disappointment and persisted with the novels … and I do love the atmosphere … the description of those oxford evenings, especially … and the buildings and churches and pubs and roads and buses … the reading is slow, I realized … and I feel that may be because there are no multiple focal points and one has to follow the trajectory of Morse’s cerebrations and the investigations that follow … Morse’s deductions fail spectacularly most of the times and its back to  the drawing board again … the reader is not given a chance to shift his/her focus or is even given a major change of scene … even if there is some minor scene change, Morse claims our attention soon enough … I could be completely wrong, of course …

Out of the blue ... one from Rankin's hand ... oooooh ... I'm over the moon ...

When Inspector Rebus retired in Exit Music, I was a bit sad.  I had enjoyed reading the Rebus novels and now there would be no more new Rebus novels to look out for.  Of course, there were quite a few in-between Rebus novels that I hadn’t read, but as I was reading them as I got them, I was not too worried.  But this ‘exit’ sort of put a screen over Rebus.  Rankin also appeared categorical when he more or less said that he was done with Rebus.  So that looked final then. 

While the Rebus series ended in 2007, Rankin started the Malcolm Fox series with The Complaints in 2009.  The setting was roughly the same as was in the Rebus novels, except that the Complaints and Conduct Department, where Malcolm Fox works, looks into complaints against police officers and the department (and the police officers who work there) is, understandably, hated by regular police officers.  I was not so enthused about this series and left it alone. 

Then in 2012, Rebus came back!  Rankin felt that he hadn’t done yet with Rebus and brought him back to work on cold cases in the department.  And very cleverly, Rankin merged this Rebus re-entry novel with the Fox series.  So, Standing in Another Man’s Grave became Rebus’ ‘comeback’ novel, the 18^th in the Rebus series and also the third in the Malcolm Fox series.  And thus, Fox and Rebus merged.  Rankin has written three more Rebus-Fox novels, the most-recent being Rather be the Devil this year (2016).  I was, of course, happy with this development and managed to read them all one by one.  And now am waiting to read the recent one...

After The Complaints, there was another standalone Malcolm Fox novel named The Impossible Dead.  And now that there was this merger, I was curious to see what transpired in the two standalone Malcolm Fox novels before Rebus merged into the Fox stream.  At that time secondhandbooksindia.com was my regular hunting ground and I remember finding The Impossible Dead there.  I had bought the book early this year, but did not find the time or inclination to read it, mainly because I wanted to read The Complaints before I started on this one.  So, the novel lay unread.  I recently found The Complaints on one of the used books portals on Amazon and that gave me the incentive to start the Malcolm Fox series.  And one day, a couple of months ago, I idly picked up The Impossible Dead to just flip through and was shocked and surprised by what I found ... 

Was this real?  This was totally out of nowhere.  An author-signed copy of one of my favourite author’s books falling into my lap just like that??!! ... get outta here ... but I, being the eternal sceptic, decided to make sure and went online to cross-verify ... and the result?  As far as I can see, the many images of Ian Rankin’s signature that I saw on the net are similar to the one on this book ... I think that should do and I am happy ... and there are those curious questions ... who was/were the previous owner/s of this book?  does the website have this information?  where did this 'signature ceremony' occur?  why prompted the owner to sell this book?  and didn't the website chaps notice this?  did the owner have to stand in a queue to get this book signed by Rankin?  was the queue long ....  and so on and so forth ...    

One more for the MARTIN BECK set … Murder at the Savoy …

Though I was pleasantly surprised when I saw Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Murder at the Savoy on sale at one of the used books portals on Amazon, I wanted to be absolutely sure.  There was no photo of the book cover and that made me cautious.  I wanted to see the photo of the cover to see if the book belonged to the MARTIN BECK set I was putting together (see here http://jaisiri.blogspot.in/search/label/Martin%20Beck%20series for posts on ongoing efforts at putting the unique set together).  If not, I could very well abandon it.  I sent a message to the seller and asked him if they could mail me the photo of the cover.  I got the picture on my phone and was elated to see that it did belong to the set and fit the vacant ‘N’ slot in MARTIN BECK.  Ooh … that was some relief. 

The novels in this particular series are hard to come by and I have to rely on used books stores to fill the gaps.  Though I had read a couple of ‘Martin Beck’ novels, I was not aware of this ‘MARTIN BECK’ set until one fine March afternoon last year in Secunderabad when I saw four novels and picked them up.  Once I realized what I had got, the obsession to get the other novels to complete the set caught hold of me.  And when I realized how daunting the task would be, I sort of calmed down.

And in August this year, there was some rekindling of hope when, out of the blue, I found two more in the ‘MARTIN BECK’ set on one of the used books portals on Amazon.  I had six now and I have been checking those portals regularly since then and found Murder at the Savoy …

I have seven now … ‘_ART_NBE_K’ … and this is how my ‘MARTIN BECK’ set looks now …

I need three more M, I, and C to make my set complete … though it promises to be a long haul, it sure is an interesting thing to be preoccupied with …  and if my luck holds good, I might get one more soon enough … fingers crossed … 

The Unexpected Completion of Ian Rankin's 'Inspector Rebus' Collection ...

One of the spinoffs (though a welcome one!!) of my avariciously rushing through the buying and reading of Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks novels (recounted with great humour and energy through a series of posts earlier) was the entirely unintended filling of gaps in my collection of Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels. 

I heard about Ian Rankin for the first time only around six years ago, when he was all over all the newspapers in India.  He was visiting India and there were interviews and articles in all the major English papers.  But what caught my attention was a conversation between Rankin and Prakash Karat, then General Secretary of the CPI (M), and an avid Rankin fan, that appeared in The Hindu (28 January 2010 see here).  Amidst all the discussion about Rankin’s Rebus novels and crime fiction in general, Karat and Rankin also talk about politics, economics, the working class, etc.  It was a very perceptive interview.  It not only gave me the motivation to start reading Rankin’s Rebus novels, but also told me in an elliptical manner the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of reading crime fiction, especially of the police procedural variety. 

I remember (through my old posts) buying my first Rankin novel, Knots and Crosses, in July 2010.  I had a tough time getting into the world of Rebus.  It was my first experience with a police procedural novel after reading a lot of ‘detective fiction.’  I bought other Rebus novels and read them and sometimes bought more than one at a time.    

Anyway, all this happened and more happened.  Rankin’s novels eased the path towards other novelists and their ‘Inspector’ protagonists … Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Inspector Beck, Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander, Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks, Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse (just started …).  I used to read these novels as and when I got them, usually at secondhand books shops or stalls at Abids.  But the used-books store at Amazon changed everything for me … and the rest is hystery … ha ha ha … it was as if I had discovered a gold mine and went on a buying and binge reading spree, specifically Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks novels.  One thing led to another and only two more Banks novels were left to buy, but either was with two different sellers.  In the ensuing confusion (recounted here ‘with great hilarity and wit’), I ended up buying all the Rebus novels that were not in my collection so far.  So, that’s how my Rebus collection saw completion … except for the most recent one Even Dogs in the Wild …