The British detective novel has famously been popular with little old ladies. Part of its charm in that market is its safe-as-houses premise of violent deeds staged in a limited compass, and a cast of suspects numbering no more than a dozen.
Fortunately for the rest of us, this tight canvas evolved decades ago from villages with red telephone booths and primrose paths to dark post-industrial towns with stinking tenements and unlit doorways where bodies are dumped. The suspects are now an infinite population of disaffected yobs. It has all become noir enough to satisfy the most bloody-minded reader.
Jack Frost, the anti-hero of six novels by R D Wingfield, is a sloppy cop who can just barely keep up with his cases. He can’t be bothered about paperwork (what fictional detective can?) and he makes intuitive leaps instead of deductions based on evidence. He makes deals with petty criminals as needed to go after the big fish. He searches premises with breezy threats rather than with a warrant, and sometimes he just breaks in. In detective fiction, such behaviour is a cliché. Beyond cliché and well into caricature are his bosses and colleagues, always ready to take credit and pass on blame.
But Frost goes beyond anti-hero. He is an anti-detective. He forgets names and dates. He gets shot in the head. He stumbles on solutions because the criminals are clumsier than he is. And it is impossible for readers to cut through the detective’s confusion and solve any of these mysteries for themselves.
So why read the Inspector Frost stories? For the dialogue, mostly. It is dark and dirty and has you laughing on every page.
Most of the action unfolds in dialogue rather than narrative, perhaps because of Wingfield’s long career in writing radio plays. That snappy writing is what made the books so easily adaptable for the television series A Touch of Frost, although the screen detective is a sanitised version.
On the page, Frost is blasphemous, obscene and sexist. He may leave stones unturned during his lurching investigations, but he never leaves a filthy joke untold. He can’t resist goosing any colleague, male or female, who has the misfortune to bend over a filing cabinet as he passes by. He smokes stolen cigarettes in people’s faces. He calls every woman he sees by a rude name under his breath, especially the ones who turn him on.
Needless to say, he has a heart of gold. His mind and his tongue are at their sharpest when little children are missing, even when he doesn’t actually find them alive. And he is, in his own way, a karma yogi, carrying out his duty without looking for the fruit of his actions. After he has stuck his neck out to find the criminal, or the kidnapped boy or the runaway girl, he lets the laurels fall to any colleague who will fill out the right forms. The medal for bravery he keeps stashed in a drawer somewhere was won almost by the way.
Apart from the murders at the centre of the novels, episodes of senseless tragedy add to their realism, ranging from the forced outing of two elderly lesbians to the death of a teenage couple running from police who weren’t chasing them in the first place.
Wingfield died in 2007 and the sixth in his cold, dark series, A Killing Frost, was published a year after his death. But a detective who has become so popular on television is seldom laid to rest. Two new Frost books are to be written, by other authors, on behalf of the estate of Rodney David Wingfield. In this genre, naturally, death is the beginning of a story, not the end.
[The author is a writer, editor and compulsive reader based in Palakkad, Kerala]
