The Lolita Man

Originally published in 1986, "The Lolita Man" was the second of James's long-running series of "Harper & Iles mysteries" which as of 2008 numbers twenty-five titles. A 79-year-old Welshman and former newspaperman whose real name is James Tucker (under which name he published a study of Anthony Powell), James is nothing like his contemporaries P. D. James and Ruth Rendell. He is not absorbed with motive nor does he have a young girl's murder serve as a pretext for an investigation of something more interesting. His prose is not elegant but angular and unadorned, and his Britain has less in common with Adam Dalgliesh's than with Theodore Dalrymple's. Crime is not an isolated incident there, but a rising tide that the police are nearly powerless to hold back. "The detective is dead," Iles explains in the novel by that title. "Which detective?" Harpur replies. "I hadn't heard." "Jerk. The detective as species. . . . Courts won't hear confessions, they throw out informant cases, still give every career villain the right to silence, disbelieve police evidence as a matter of course. Judges disallow material recorded in trap situations--alleging we're provocateurs. Juries are threatened and bribed. Villains keep special insurance funds for nobbling them. Where's detection?" The best the police can hope for is gunplay, so they can shoot too; they plant evidence where necessary; they do whatever they can to avoid going to trial. Not likely to please the civil libertarians, as Iles acknowledges, but there is something more important than approved procedure. Quoting Halifax's "Character of a Trimmer," he insists that the law must be "in good hands"--his and Harpur's, not the lawyers'. The point is not, as cliché has it, that a thin line separates law enforcement from "crookedness"; but rather that the line separating them is not procedural. James's best novel is "Roses, Roses," the tenth in the Harpur & Iles series. In "The Lolita Man," James was still experimenting, still searching for the right approach. His signature technique of alternating chapters, though, was already in place--Harpur's investigation alternates with diary entries by a fourteen-year-old girl who is being stalked by the Lolita Man--but James also tries something daring. Starting with the fifth chapter, he lets the pedophile speak for himself. Commences then a complex and suspenseful three-way dance in which the Lolita Man stalks the girl, who knows she is being watched by the man she calls Mr Dark Eyes, but who is also (unbeknownst to her) being watched by Harpur, who suspects that she may be the next victim, and who is known and watched by the Lolita Man, whom Harpur does not know. James's Lolita Man is a patient watchful stranger in need of love, not help ("love, only love, love from a girl, a girl not too old, a girl really young, a gentle and kind girl from a nice private school with high class navy and red uniform, a girl who has not been playing around with boys, letting

This second entry in James' lengthy (20+ books) "Harpur + Iles" series takes place not too long after the first ("You'd Better Believe It) and finds DCS Colin Harpur and his colleagues in a fictional small seaside city on England's southern coastline picking up the pieces after the fifth rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in the last several months. In the first book James also employed this device of dropping the reader into the middle of a case, and it's a nice change of pace from most writers, who like to build everything up from the very begining. Clearly, Harpur and the gang have been chasing the titular killer for quite some time now, and aren't getting anywhere. It also becomes evident that two of the killings occured in an adjacent county, where the police force is headed by Catholics, one of whom may be in line to take over Chief Barton's place once he retires (which he's vowed to do as soon as the killer is caught). This puts the virulantly careerist and cynical Assistant Chief Iles in a lather, as he can't stand the idea of "Micks" and "Papists" taking over the place. This bitter rivalry works both ways, since Barton and Illes are Freemasons, which the county cops loathe -- and the upshot of all this is that there is zero cooperation between the two investigations. At times the perspective switches to the killer himself, whose inner ramblings give some form of character to what might otherwise be a faceless monster, and his delusional motivations make much more sense than most serial killer plots. The reader is also taken into the mind of the killer's next target, a young teenage girl who writes florid naive romantic scenarios in her diary. In both cases, James nails the voice of the characters and makes the situation quite beleivable (which is always the hardest part of a serial killer plot). Meanwhile, Harpur is left to lurch around the city aimlessly guessing at where the killer may strike next. This is rather in keeping with the first book, which also found him totally bewildered at times, and adrift in a morally grey zone involving informers. (Actually, this is one aspect I was a little dissapointed to find missing. In "You'd Better Believe It", Harper uses informers quite a bit, and I was expecting him to call upon his underworld contact here as well, although that might have smacked too much of the classic film "M"...) Eventually the investigation starts leading somewhere, and as it does, the rivalry subplot grows more and more important and Iles starts to suspect Harpur of cooperation with the Catholic cops, leading to some very nasty exchanges. Indeed, in the first book Iles was always lurking in the background, but here he blossoms as a full character with some of the most off-the-wall dialogue to be found in a crime novel. His switching back and forth between saying the correct thing in public and the most nasty cynical thing in private is so fluid that one is reminded of some Shakespearean character alternating between

This is #2 in the 19 book Harpur/Iles series of hard-edged British police procedurals by Bill James. That fact that I acquired all 19 after reading just one speaks loads about my perspective on this series. Considering this review was written the morning after virtually the entire top command structure of the SFPD was indicted by a grand jury, perhaps James reccuring cynical theme of moral ambiguity amongst the "good guys", even in the throes of trying to stop a serial child murder, is all too close to art imitating life. Anyway, a crackling good read if you don't mind the cynicism inherent in James' perspective that the thin blue line is actually grey....very grey.

The Second in the Harpur and Iles series. An excellent gripping page-turner!!! I have read these in order, and this is THE ONE that really hooks you in. The case itself is a tough one to solve, someone is killing young teenage girls, and not really leaving any decent clues. Meanwhile, the continued insight into Harpur's risque personal life continues to keep the pages rolling by. Highly recommend this one for any fan of Police Procedurals!!!

As a reader of every Bill James paperback I can find, I have yet to read a bad one. He has mastered his characters, his locale and the violent clash between cops and criminals.