Charlie Says

I'm working my way through John Harvey's Charlie Resnick series, and I have to say that Harvey is a masterful writer. (I read a review of his most recent, and I believe last, in the series, and read it. It was so good I had to go the library and get the first 14 in the series.)

Theoretically these are mysteries, more precisely police procedurals. But they're really more like novels with a mystery woven in. The characters, particularly the jazz loving, sandwich eating, cat owning, slightly overweight Resnick, are lovingly drawn and very three dimensional.

I was initially drawn to the series because his most recent book takes its title from a Billie Holiday tune, a theme that runs throughout the book. Resnick listens to a lot of jazz, particularly early bop and from the period just before bop, and has cats named after Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Pepper Adams and Miles Davis (I'm sure if he acquires a fifth he'll name it after Charlie Parker). He slogs his way through the human scum of an unnamed English city in the midlands (it's Notttingham), fighting a losing battle and occasionally wondering why.

Many of the other characters — most appear in more than one book — are equally three dimensional, and the series will tell most Americans more about a certain segment of English life than most of us would otherwise ever know. (There are, as it turns out, many things one can do with a sausage besides eat it for breakfast.)

These aren't slam bam page turners — long stretches go by with little action — but they're riveting just the same. Try one and see what you think.