Tue 29 Dec 2020
Archived Mystery Review: SHEILA RADLEY – The Chief Inspector’s Daughter
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[3] Comments
SHEILA RADLEY – The Chief Inspector’s Daughter. Inspector Quantrill #2. Scribner’s, US, hardcover, 1980. Constable, UK, hardcover 1981. Dell / Murder Ink, paperback, 1981. Bantam, paperback, 1987. Felony & Mayhem, trade paperback, 2007.
The inspector’s name is Quantrill, and you may have met him before in Death in the Morning. That one I haven’t read myself, but I’m going to. This one’s a good one.
To tell you the truth, though, I wasn’t so sure it was going to be when I started. The first couple of chapters are not all that promising. Stories involving British policemen and their dreary home lives I find more-or-less depressing. A little bit of it, at least, usually goes a long way.
Apparently, vital communications between Quantrill and his wife have been gradually breaking down over the years, and to compound the problem, their younger daughter has just arrived home from London after a break-up with her lover. Nothing like a good case of murder to bring a family together, hmmm?
But that’s just what it does. Daughter Alison takes a job as an assistant to Jasmine Woods, a well-known writer of romantic fiction. When Alison finds her employer brutally murdered one morning, she goes into shock, and then she disappears before revealing the important clue she knows.
Some of the best clues in this story are provided by the simple expedient of omission, however, and you as reader are going to have to stay on your toes to stay ahead of the game. The plotting is rather cleverly done, but Sheila Radley does play fair. And you really do have good chance of beating Quantrill to the killer.
I liked the ending. While it has nothing to do with the mystery, per se, I think by story’s end the characters have indeed become reasonable facsimiles of human beings for it to considered on of the better cliffhanger finales I’ve read in quite some time.
Rating: B plus.
The Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill series —
Death and the Maiden (n.) H. Hamilton 1978.
The Chief Inspector’s Daughter (n.) Constable 1981.
A Talent for Destruction (n.) Constable 1982.
Blood on the Happy Highway (n.) Constable 1983.
Fate Worse Than Death (n.) Constable 1985.
Who Saw Him Die? (n.) Constable 1987.
This Way Out (n.) Constable 1989.
Cross My Heart and Hope to Die (n.) Constable 1992.
Fair Game (n.) Constable 1994.
December 29th, 2020 at 6:08 pm
I wouldn’t say I loved it, but I liked this series enough to seek out the books in England, and I know I read the first five or six at least. I don’t remember reading the last two.
December 29th, 2020 at 7:07 pm
Even so, you’ve read more of them than I have, even though I liked this one a lot. Around the mid 1980s I kind of soured on British police inspectors and their unhappy home lives. There were just too many of them.
And maybe I wasn’t the only one, here in the US anyway. The last one was never published in this country.
But as I said, this one was a good one.
December 29th, 2020 at 8:14 pm
I can recall when critics ranted on and on about the home life of Roger West and George Gideon, which seldom interfered with the plot or action and then suddenly every policeman in British mystery fiction seemed doomed to live up to Tolstoy’s comment on unhappy families (“all happy families are happy in the same way and all unhappy families are unhappy differently).
Radley handled it as well or better than most, but it did quickly become a tiresome trope rather like the one where the Inspector has a friend who is a handsome forensic expert with a sexy wife (George and Grimes).