I really miss Catherine Aird (1930-2024), the creator of the wonderful Christopher Dennis Sloan, otherwise known as CD, the long-suffering inspector of the fictional Beresbury CID in West Calleshire, England. West Calleshire was largely drawn from the county of Kent, where Aird, real name Kinn Hamilton McIntosh, lived most of her life. Sloan reports to Superintendent Leeyes, who is irritable and often unreasonably demanding. He frequents the local Adult Education classes and is prone to quoting odd bits of information from the latest class that may or may not be relevant to the subject at hand. Sloan is invariably saddled with the inept Constable Crosby, who in real life would have been booted out of law enforcement long ago.
Aird received the CWA Dagger in the Library in 1992 and the CWA Diamond Dagger in 2015.
I read the series long ago when I first discovered it and have been doing some re-reading. I am struck anew by just how very good the plots are. A Dead Liberty (Collins, 1986) is the 12th book in Sloan’s cases. He comes into it a little late.
In what looked like an open-and-shut investigation, Lucy Durmast was accused of poisoning an employee of her father’s. He had just become engaged to his hometown girlfriend and jealousy was thought to be the motive for the murder. The meal she prepared for him was the only food he’d taken that day that wasn’t shared with others, making her the obvious and sole suspect. The first indication that things would not go as expected was when Lucy refused to speak at her arrest and interrogation. She declined to talk when the judge asked for her plea, and she wouldn’t say a word when she was consequently imprisoned for contempt of court. She politely listened to everything said to her but she would not respond. This extraordinary behavior puzzled and worried everyone, including her friends, the police, the prosecutor, and the judge.
Then the original investigating officer was injured in an accident and Inspector Sloan was assigned to wrap the case up for the prosecutor to present at trial. When the college friend of the victim disappeared and another person known to the accused was killed, Inspector Sloan started from the beginning and conducted a brand-new investigation to get to the bottom of a situation that everyone was beginning to see was not what it appeared to be.
An unexpected convoluted story line. I enjoyed it immensely and recommend the series to anyone who enjoys classic detective fiction.