Hanging out with Higgins

Michael Wood

• Silent Partner by Jonathan Kellerman
  Macdonald, 506 pp, £11.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 356 17598 7
• ‘Murder will out’: The Detective in Fiction by T.J. Binyon
  Oxford, 166 pp, £12.95, June 1989, ISBN 0 19 219223 X
• Devices and Desires by P.D. James
  Faber, 408 pp, £11.99, October 1989, ISBN 0 571 14178 1
• Killshot by Elmore Leonard
  Viking, 287 pp, £12.95, October 1989, ISBN 0 670 82258 2
• Trust by George V. Higgins
  Deutsch, 213 pp, £11.95, November 1989, ISBN 0 233 98513 1
• Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith
  Collins Harvill, 373 pp, £12.95, October 1989, ISBN 0 00 271269 5

There is food for comparative thought – well, not real food, more of a light snack – in the fact that the French call roman policier what we would call a crime novel. A sign of our respective allegiances, perhaps, where our hearts are. Of course there don’t have to be police in a roman policier, just the sorts of activity the Police might or ought to be interested in. And there are more and more policemen in our crime novels (and films and television series). Crime, like almost everything else, has become specialised, a full-time job on both sides of the law. The gentleman amateur has faded away almost entirely. There are still one or two private eyes about, but they look like bruised anachronisms – like maiden aunts or men of letters.