Bill James

• Born: August 15, 1929
• Place of Birth: Cardiff, Wales

TYPES OF PLOT: Police procedural; hard-boiled; espionage

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Colin Harpur and Desmond Iles, 1985-2022; Simon Abelard, 2001-2003

Contribution

Bill James (1929-2023) is best known for his long-running Colin Harpur and Desmond Iles series. These books are unusual because they pay almost as much attention to the criminals as to the police, with both good and bad guys sharing characteristics, including a belief in self-improvement through higher education. James said he was equally interested in both sides of the law and that his novels are about the impossibility of controlling crime through conventional methods. He cited George V. Higgins (1939-1999) as the main influence on his work, calling The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972) the greatest crime novel ever. Both writers shared an interest in gritty urban settings and realistic, though playful dialogue.

The Harpur and Iles books are essentially exercises in mood and style, with James’s dialogue a distinctive blend of that of , , , and especially . His characters develop an almost-music-hall-like pattern reminiscent of early Pinter plays. Notably, he wrote under the names David Craig, Judith Jones, and James Tucker at different times during his career.

Although many prominent mystery and detective writers are highly productive, James is one of the few whose productivity and quality improved after turning fifty. He contributed over twenty-five novels to his Colin Harpur and Desmond Iles series after his fiftieth birthday, along with several stand-alone works. These include Easy Streets (2004), In the Absence of Iles (2008), Play Dead (2013), First Fix Your Alibi (2016), Hitmen I Have Known (2019), and his final work, Low Pastures (2022).

Biography

Bill James was born James Tucker in Cardiff, Wales, on August 15, 1929, to William Arthur Tucker and Violet Irene Bushen Tucker. He grew up in Cardiff’s Grangetown section, and his father’s relatives lived in the dockland area known as Clarence Bridge. William Tucker worked on a sand dredger, traveling in and out of Cardiff, and his son spent his holidays aboard. Later, as a journalist, James used Clarence Bridge as an occasional pseudonym, and many of his novels are set in Cardiff docks. James graduated from the University of Wales (then University College, Cardiff) in 1951 and was a flying officer in the Royal Air Force from 1951 to 1953. He married Marian Craig on July 17, 1954. Their children are Patrick, Catherine, Guy, and David.

Young James knew he wanted to be a writer, and when he saw in a career guidance book that the minimum weekly wage for London reporters was nine guineas (fifty cents), a lavish salary at the time, he decided to become a journalist. He was a reporter for Cardiff’s Western Mail in 1954-1956 and for London’s Daily Mirror in 1956-1958. James said that the terse, tabloid style of the Daily Mirror was a major influence on his fiction.

James returned to South Wales in 1958 and worked as a freelance journalist, contributing to such publications as New Society, Punch, The Spectator, and The Sunday Times. In addition to articles and fiction, James wrote radio plays and radio and television documentaries. He was a part-time tutor at the University of Wales beginning in 1968. He received a master’s degree in English from that institution in 1974, and his thesis was published as The Novels of Anthony Powell (1976). The influence of the author of A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975) can be seen in James’s use of irony and in his creation of characters who continue throughout a series of novels.

James began his fiction-writing career by trying literary fiction, works that he has said are best forgotten, moved to espionage novels when the works of and became popular during the 1960s, and turned to crime in the 1970s, writing under his own name and the pseudonym David Craig, from his wife’s maiden name and the name of his youngest son. He revived the name of Craig in the 1990s for novels set on the Cardiff docks and returned to espionage with the Simon Abelard series beginning with Split (2001), featuring a black intelligence agent. The two-book series ended with A Man's Enemies (2003). James also had two series featuring women, police officer Sally Bithron, writing as Craig, and private investigator Kerry Lake, writing as Judith Jones.

Analysis

Bill James’s Colin Harpur and Desmond Iles series is remarkable for leaving so many loose ends dangling at the conclusion of each novel. Part of James’s approach is that he is writing not only individual books but also one giant novel in which the events in one book have ramifications in a later work. In some cases, the two protagonists, Harpur and Iles, receive equal attention. In others, one is more prominent than the other. In some, the villains overshadow the veteran police officers, though James does not glamorize or romanticize criminals. No matter how well-dressed or how many adult education courses they complete, they remain ruthless thugs.

According to James, he does not strive for realism, preferring to create a stylized universe with some realistic touches. This approach makes the often unusual events facing his police have a dreamlike logic. In addition to the setting, the time is also vague, with none of the characters ever getting any older. All the events seem to be occurring in an eternal present.

Throughout the Harpur and Iles series, James favors the down-to-earth Harpur over the rather pompous Iles. However, the assistant chief constable is never a caricature, the target of easy irony. Charming and smart, though not as smart as he likes to think, Iles is a fully realized creation. He and Harpur, the Everyman, together represent a single complex and flawed personality. Both make mistakes. Each is aware of at least some of his flaws. They have a superficial resemblance to ’s Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis and to ’s Dalziel and Pascoe, especially the adversarial relationship of the latter.

The best crime fiction, as with Chandler, Leonard, , , , and many others, is highly literary. James’s novels stand out for downplaying many genre conventions, especially the significance of plot. Although each Harpur and Iles book has a basic premise, James uses it merely as a starting point to delve more deeply into character and mood. Not only are some crimes not fully resolved, but also the police often carry on the most perfunctory of investigations. “Villains will be villains” seems to be the police officers’ philosophy, and as long as the criminals kill each other and not the general populace, everything is under control. Though James has been called the darkest, least optimistic of British crime writers, he is sympathetic to but amused by the variety of human foibles adrift in his corrupt milieu. He has also been termed grimly jocular.

James loves giving colorful names to his criminals. Minor thugs are known as Sashsaying Vernon and Mildly Sedated. One ironically called Tenderness Mellick is especially vicious. Panicking Ralph Ember remains a crime boss despite his well-known tendency to become easily flustered. Cohorts even call him Panicking to his face.

Central to James’s style are allusions to popular culture, especially films. Panicking Ralph Ember frequently mentions his resemblance to the young Charlton Heston. After a season of French films, Iles has his hair cut in the manner of Jean Gabin. Such references underscore how both police officers and criminals are constantly aware of role-playing.

Some of James’s touches sneak up on readers. Not only are the Harpur and Iles tales full of young women, but also everyone, both police officers and criminals, seem to have daughters instead of sons. Each is paternalistic yet lecherous toward the daughters of others.

Although some crime writers excel at descriptive passages and are weak on dialogue, or vice versa, James is a master at both. Each entry in the series offers several tour-de-force segments as well as hilarious speeches by both the police and the criminals. Many conversations between Harpur and Iles feature a series of short, cryptic statements like those made by characters in a Pinter play. At other times, the pair will talk lengthily at cross-purposes, with the statements of each having little to do with what the other is saying. Two criminals even get into a semantic debate over the different meanings of apparent.

Although the unspecified urban locale of the Harpur and Iles series resembles Cardiff, the docklands of the writer’s hometown are the specific setting of the series about police officers Dave Brade and Glyndwr Jenkins, beginning with Forget It (1995) and continuing with The Tattooed Detective (1998), Torch (1999), and Bay City (2000). The Brade and Jenkins books deal with how such matters as urban redevelopment and organized crime intersect, again with a thin line between the upholders of the law and those who break it. James resurrected his David Craig pseudonym for this series, cited as one of the highlights of the Welsh noir developing in the 1990s.

The Sally Bithron novelsHear Me Talking to You (2005) and Tip Top (2005)are another Cardiff police officer short series. Both Sally and Assistant Chief Constable Esther Davidson use their work to escape from domestic woes. In both the Bithron and Brade and Jenkins books, London criminal gangs try to overpower the Cardiff criminal world. In Split, the first Simon Abelard novel, a British spy bored after the collapse of European communism becomes a drug dealer. The second Abelard book, A Man’s Enemies (2004), focuses on the infighting within British intelligence caused by former officers’ memoirs. Because Abelard is of mixed race—the product of a Welsh mother and a Jamaican father—he is constantly uncertain of his status within the intelligence community.

James is best known for his Harpur and Iles novels. Although this series has had a greater impact than his other fiction has, its success gives him the freedom to try other characters and settings.

Pay Days

In Pay Days (2001), James draws a parallel between the rivalry of Harpur and Iles and that of criminal bosses Ralph Ember and Mansel Shale. These villains ostensibly cooperate with each other, though both secretly plot each other’s downfall. As Ember and Shale conspire to cover up the murder of a drug dealer and the police pursue the truth about the case, more killings result.

Pay Days is full of distinctive James touches. Harpur’s daughters question his professional ethics. Shale thinks quoting from the film The Godfather (1972) makes him seem more worldly and threatening. Aspiring to respectability, Ember becomes involved in environmental causes and protests when his daughters’ exclusive private school drops Latin and Greek. A politician blames the fiction of and the films of Quentin Tarantino for the moral confusion of the educated class.

The Girl with the Long Back

In The Girl with the Long Back (2003), to protect Louise Machin, an undercover female officer who has infiltrated drug lord Ferdy Dubal’s gang, Harpur and his primary informant, Jack Lamb, kill two of Ferdy’s enforcers. As is typical of James’s indirect approach to narrative, these killings occur offstage. Harpur does not have to work hard to cover up his crime because no one, including Ferdy, cares too much about two more dead villains. Harpur must, however, keep Iles from discovering too much because the undercover operation was conducted without the approval of the assistant chief constable.

Then Wayne Rideout, Iles’s main informant, is murdered, and the assistant chief constable becomes obsessed with Fay-Alice Rideout, the victim’s beautiful daughter, whose education, first at an exclusive school and then at Oxford, is underwritten by the police. The much smarter Fay-Alice seems to enjoy encouraging Iles’s attention, while not taking him that seriously. Toward the end of the novel, the focus shifts from Harpur, Iles, Louise, and Fay-Alice to the bubbling rivalry among the gangs. Just as Iles desires, the criminals settle scores by killing one another.

Split

The title, Split, is a metaphor for Simon Abelard’s ethnic, professional, and emotional status. Uncomfortable as a spy because he can never be sure whether his superiors see him as a token black, Abelard finds his usual duties suspended while he attempts to locate Julian Bowling, a colleague who has gone missing with at least nine million dollars in drug money.

As Abelard tracks Bowling to France, he discovers he is suspected of being in league with the fugitive. After falling for Lucy, Bowling’s bisexual girlfriend, Abelard begins to wonder whether he is a spy, an officer, or a criminal. Matters are further complicated by the actions of his immediate superior, Verdun Cadwallader, a fellow Welshman. Though the Abelard titles have more straightforward narratives than the Harpur and Iles series, James still provides his offbeat humor, especially with Cadwallader’s cocky viciousness and Abelard’s eccentric mother.

Principal Series Characters:

• Colin Harpur is a detective chief superintendent in an unnamed British seaport. He has an affair with the wife of another detective, Desmond Iles, and his own wife is murdered, leaving him to raise two precocious daughters. His much younger, student girlfriend, Denise, occasionally stays with him, to the delight of Harpur’s daughters. Despite being large and loutish, resembling a boxer, Harpur possesses the wit and irony Iles lacks and performs his investigative tasks more ably.
• Desmond Iles, an assistant chief constable, is Harpur’s boss and adversary, constantly bringing up Colin’s affair with his wife, to whom he reconciled. A debonair ladies’ man, Iles is drawn to much younger women, including Harpur’s teenage daughters. To maintain some degree of peace in his city, Iles arranges for an understanding between the rival criminal gangs who control the local drug trade. Because of Chief Mark Lane’s weak, ineffectual leadership, Iles essentially runs the department. Supremely confident, Iles is quick to pounce on the failings of his subordinates, while confessing his need to be loved by everyone.

Bibliography

Gould, John A. “Harpur, Iles, and the Shadow of Anthony Powell.” The Boston Globe, 4 July 2004, p. 8.

James, Bill. Interview by Anthony Brockway. homepage.ntlworld.com/elizabeth.ercocklly/bill.htm.

Lenzer, Steve. “Crime and Punishment.” Review of Naked at the Window, by Bill James. The Weekly Standard, vol. 8, no. 41, 30 June 2003, p. 31.

"Low Pastures." Kirkus Reviews, 2022, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/bill-james/low-pastures. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Pederson, Jay P., and Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf. St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, 4th ed., St. James Press, 1996.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. Routledge, 2005.

Thorneycroft, Euan. "Bill James." A.M. Heath, amheath.com/authors/bill-james. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.