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Resnick About Resnick The Resnick Short Stories Select a Resnick Novel
“Resnick is British crime fiction’s best kept secret. Critics love the series and so do many readers but not nearly as many readers as the books merit. Even a brief stint on television in the 90s (with a pre-Hollywood Tom Wilkinson as Resnick) did not provide the breakthrough. It’s a puzzle because resnick is, in many ways, the most believable policeman in British crime fiction. Sure he’s got his foibles —Ýmaking exotic sandwiches for instance — but they can be explained by the fact that he’s Polish. H arvey has said he made him Polish so he could have oddities, ‘his compassion, his romanticism, his love of jazz’. He has also said that he first got a physical sense of the character : ‘I saw him walking down the hill from a police station towards the city centre. He was big and bulky and he was wearing this shabby raincoat. I never saw his face.’ In the 10 novels and numerous short stories Harvey wrote about Resnick before ending the series, he established his character as a believable ordinary policeman. Resnick investigated ordinary, everyday crime, rooted in the socio-economic plight and drab lives of many people in the city of Nottingham. All 10 books in the series are available, but watch out too for Harvey's new book, ‘Flesh and Blood’ (Heinemann, April). It’s the first of a series featuring a new character: Cornish-based ex-policeman Frank Elder.” Peter Guttridge, Waterstone’s Books Quarterly, Issue 11, 2004 immortals of the genre Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post "Absolutely brilliant" Andrew Vachss "Brilliant, yes! The characteristic infection of urban wrong injected straight into the novel's main artery. Valentine Cunningham BBC Radio 3 "Harvey writes better crime novels than anyone in the world." Denver Post "His Nottingham dekalog stands as an impeccable monument to the craft and depth of British Crime Fiction." Maxim Jakubowski, The Guardian, September 24, 1999 "The most accomplished crime series of the 1990s" Bill Ott, Booklist In all there are ten novels in the Resnick series, beginning Charlie Resnick is a Detective Inspector, Here are some comments from fellow writers critics on the series as a whole: "Harvey reminds me of Graham Greene, a stylist who tells you everything you need to know while keeping the prose clean and simple. It's a very realistic style that draws you into the story without the writer getting in the way." "Harvey does what a storyteller is supposed to do. He sets the terms of the universe in which he proposes to work, and then he sticks to them. No silly surprises. · when he takes you down a mean street, kid, there's no doubt where you are." "There is a painful pleasure in the Resnick novels. John Harvey writes them as Resnick's jazz heroes would have played them, with a bitter-sweet melancholy." Sarah Dunant "If the title King of Crime is to go to the male writer who is at the summit of his form and writing some of the best crime fiction this side of the Atlantic, the crown is John Harvey's." Marcel Berlins The Times "With a mature and confident style pitched midway between Elmore Leonard and Ed McBain, John Harvey may well be the first English crime novelist to transplant convincingly the hard-boiled American aesthetic to the milieu of the British police station. His particular achievement is to use the conventions of the police procedural to paint a dirty, real picture of a British city in the uneasy Nineties." John Williams The Independent "There are now ten titles in the series, each consisting of two pointed words (Lonely Hearts, Cold Light, and so on) and all of them crammed to bursting with humdrum brutalities, harm and disaster, the sad and sorry lives of those without resources or restraints — and, sometimes, of their opponents, the law-and-order brigade. Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick himself is a lone figure, at once subdued and heroic. What he has to deal with is an inner-city nightmare — incessant assault, rape, murder, child abuse, cruelty, kidnapping, racism, law-breaking of every conceivable kind. It's a fearsome picture; but in the usual way of the skilled crime writer, Harvey casts all this appalling material in the form of entertainment, usually of a high quality, rich in atmosphere and feeling and full of suspense." "Resnick's cases come from the newspapers and reflect urban anarchy, the meaningless city brawls with Stanley knives, arterial blood blooming in underpasses,domestic child abuse, lovebites and acne, the Chinese chippy, discarded pizza containers, a first date wank on the wasteland, a child's shoe sticking out of a refuse pile with a foot in it."
"The characters in John Harvey's urban crime novels are so defiantly alive and unruly that they put these British police procedurals on a shelf by themselves." "Charlie Resnick is one of the most fully realized characters in modern crime fiction; complex and capable, a man who not only loves justice, jazz, and cats, but one who can turn the construction of a sandwich into a work of art." "In total, Harvey paints a sensitive portrait of social and moral confusion in post-industrial and post-Thatcherite England, with its isolation, poverty, unemployment, and rising violence. On a more general level, he also paints a picture of life's miseries, stroke by bluesy stroke; those indefinable emotions that are so difficult to talk about: life passing, death approaching and love which does not last. And all with a keen sense of observation and an unerring eye for detail, well-served by an understated style."
Reviews "John Harvey's beautifully down-beat crime novel · Mr Harvey captures the anxiety and tedium of modern police work with skill, his characterisation is excellent — particularly when they are underdogs or victims." John Nicholson The Times "Harvey has made the material his own. He gives a distinct sense of his Nottingham and of the people who live here, and makes good points about the relationship of the police to that community, the relationship of women to the police, and the question of what constitutes 'a good cop'." "Crime fiction that uses formula to get at something deeper — the sometimes rancid, always pungent smell of real life." "In Lonely Hearts, John Harvey, British poet and novelist, brings depth of character study and beautiful imagery to the police procedural."
Reviews "Here he is again, beating a barrage of startling effects and unfamiliar angles out of the police procedural. The rough slice of English life is cut from the cold, grey industrial heart of the Midlands, the same spot frequented by Alan Sillitoe, and Harvey exposes it with Sillitoe's unflinchingly sardonic vision." Peter Robertson Booklist "This Nottingham vibrates with crooked and tender tensions, the dialogue snaps with wit and Harvey has surprises for the most jaded reader." "Quite simply, the British poet and novelist is an elegant stylist, as well as an accomplished storyteller: his skill adds depth to every character in the book and his poetic imagery brings life to the unnamed town in England's Midlands where the story is set." "The feel of England is everywhere in this book." "Rough Treatment combined a gripping and well-handled plot with subtly-drawn characters and believably witty dialogue. As in Lonely Hearts, the background and habits of the Polish community in Nottingham are constantly present, providing a great deal of subsidiary interest. Many British crime writers try to draw in features of this kind, but Harvey is one of the very few to succeed. Furthermore, his books are distinguished by a very unusual mood, a flickering between the quick-witted and the melancholic that is unmatched by other writers. "The two novels, (Lonely Hearts & Rough Treatment), written in a style that successfully approximates an English Elmore Leonard and set in Nottingham, show British crime fiction coming of age." "A highly persuasive and enjoyable read · an excellent police procedural · John Harvey proves that after many years of recidivism English crime writing is well on the way to being rehabilitated."
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 | OFF MINOR Raymond Cooke, a none - too - bright youth working in a slaughterhouse finds the body of a six year old girl in an empty warehouse; when another young child goes missing, Raymond is high among the list of suspects. click for a larger cover |
US Hardback: Henry Holt (0-8050-1264-6) Paperback: Avon (0-38072009-4) UK Hardback: Viking (0-670-83187-5) Trade Paperback: (0-670-84526-4) Paperback: Penguin (0-14-013099-3) Arrow (0-7493-2155-5) Arrow Reissue (0-09-942156-9) | |
"Suspects, cops, grieving relatives, alarmed teachers, creepy kids from the neighbourhood — no one escapes the glare of the author's insights or the warmth of his compassion for the pathetic frailties of human nature."
Marilyn Stasio The New York Times Book Review
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 | WASTED YEARS A series of armed robberies bears an uncanny resemblance to a spate of similar crimes Resnick investigated ten years previously, at a particularly painful time when his marriage was on the rocks and divorce staring him in the face. click for a larger cover |
US Hardback: Henry Holt (0-8050-2044-6) Paperback: Avon (0-380-72182-1) UK Hardback: Viking (0-670-84889-1) Trade Paperback: Viking (0-670-84534-5) Paperback: Arrow (0-7493-1842-2) Arrow Reissue (0-09-942155-0) | |
"Between bites Resnick talks to his cats, listens to jazz and sifts through twenty-three troubled years of his life, riddled by empty dreams, a broken marriage and old violence surfacing again to boost a new crime wave. Quite the moodiest of fictional cops and one of the most intriguing. Skilfully plotted and seamlessly written. Harvey plays a complex score without sounding a false note."
Philip Oakes Literary Review
"(Resnick) is a man who carries his past with him at all times, so it is no surprise when the past collides with the present. In the end, it is the delineation of fully rounded characters which impresses most, with shifts of perspective presenting events from the points of view of criminal, victim and policeman.
Wasted Years, with its barren, claustrophobic urban settings and concentration on character is closer to the American tradition of crime writing than any British school. It is sad to realise that the violent, empty hopelessness so long associated with the most realistic American crime fiction no longer seems out of place in a British novel."
David Horspool Times Literary Supplement
"Like an intricate jazz motif that circles back upon itself, the plot grows increasingly complicated, as someone commits a series of strikingly similar crimes.
From Resnick's bruised marriage to his flamboyant sandwiches, from the precisely drawn characters to the surprising (yet strangely inevitable) climax, from the wonderfully telling details (the villain is engrossed in a Jeffrey Archer novel) to the desolation of a decaying city, Wasted Years is a novel without one false note."
Alix Madrigal The San Francisco Chronicle
"Like Thelonious Monk and other jazz greats who make the mood music in his books, John Harvey likes to play with form. In Wasted Years, the fifth police procedural in a haunting series set in the industrial wasteland of Nottingham, the British novelist switches time frames like song keys to tell a story about the cold hopes and lost chances that breed crime in the redbrick provinces."
Marilyn Stasio The New York Time Book Review
"A dizzying but never incoherent panorama of broken dreams, brutal street language, bent cops, as well as those struggling to do their jobs and hold their lives together - all of it permeated by Charlie's unsanctimonious probity and clumsy grace. Harvey is truly master of the police procedural for the 90s."
Kirkus Reviews
"One of the leading writers of crime fiction alive today."
Le Monde
"Cook is dead. Lewis is dead. McIlvanney has vanished from the scene. British crime fiction has lost one after another of its leading authors. John Harvey is the last of its big-hearted Mohicans, the last of its witnesses to daily misery, economic recession and the grey despair that gnaws away at people's hearts and souls."
Le Figaro
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 | COLD LIGHT When Nancy Phelan, a young woman who works at the Housing office is kidnapped from outside an office Christmas party, suspicion falls on a young client who attacked her earlier that day. Little in Resnick's life is that simple, however, especially at Christmas, and as the mystery of Nancy's disappearance deepens, the most trusted of his team, Lynn Kellogg, unwittingly puts herself in the path of danger. click for a larger cover |
US Hardback: Henry Holt (0-8050-2046-2) Paperback: St Martin's (0-312-95863-3) (0-312-95603) UK Hardback: Heinemann (434-00119-8) Paperback: Arrow (0-7493-1818-X) Arrow Reissue (0-09-942157-7) | |
Reviews
The French edition of Cold Light, Lumière Froide, translated by Jean-Paul Gratias, and published by Rivages/Noir, under the direction of Francois Guérif, won the Grand Prix du Roman Étranger at the Cognac Festival International du Film Policier in April 2000, awarded for the Best Foreign Crime Novel published in France in 1999.
"There's an improbably technical grace to John Harvey's Cold Light, in addition to being an electric page turner for the high-end reader. Much like Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke, John Harvey has far transcended his genre and will especially appeal to the intelligent reader of detective fiction."
Jim Harrison
"The one British writer of cop novels with a serious interest in, and understanding of, the way we live now."
Arena
"Harvey is a fine writer with a truly original voice, and their literary quality and rich characterisation, and the compassionate insight which informs them, combine to lift the Resnick books high above the common run of police procedurals. Cold Light is a fascinating novel. With great skill the author builds up a complex narrative tapestry in which no character, however minor, is cursory."
James Melville
"Christmas warmth is notable for its absence in John Harvey's Cold Light. The season of good will for sympathetic, muddled Resnick, Nottingham's most avuncular police officer, means broken glass, child abuse and abducted women, male chauvinism running rampant in his team and a psychopath on the loose.
These are the killing fields of the East Midlands, a mirror of harsh contemporary life, but also of the loyalties which make it bearable.
Harvey has a particular skill with female characters and the real star of this gritty narrative is Resnick's junior, Lynn Kellogg, whose street wisdom is no guard against the lure of love. Chilly, mean streets, real warmth in the emotional punch which makes this subtle, sad and compulsive."
Francis Fyfield
"Voice and movement and character as revealed in action and phrase carry this fascinating account forward at an inexorable pace. This is a marvellous book, and more people ought to discover Harvey's talents."
Robin W. Winks Boston Globe
"Harvey handles this revelation of a psycho at work
with chilling mastery."
John Coleman The Times
"As the search proceeds toward its wrenching climax, Resnick's own life remains the heartbeat of the book, handled by his creator with masterly and affecting restraint.
Harvey is never better than when writing about women, which he does with a gentlemanly poet's care and love. He writes just as well about the poor, too, with a clear-eyed empathy and not a hint of patronage.
If you want a picture of Britain in the 1990s, you can find more in Cold Light's sober panorama than you'll ever see in the funhouse mirrors held up by flashier, more 'literary' British authors. John Harvey isn't showing off. He doesn't have to. He's just watching, and he knows where to look."
Carey Harrison The San Francisco Chronicle
"Cold Light is just about flawless
· a tale that will long trouble your dreams."
Maureen Corrigan Washington Post Book World
"There were times,' according to Charlie Resnick, 'when what you didn't do was play Billie Holiday singing 'Our Love is Here To Stay'. In John Harvey's Cold Light, this moody English copper comes to realize that Christmas is one of those perilous times."
Marilyn Stasio The New York Times Book Review
"Harvey's sixth industrial-strength procedural featuring Nottingham copper Charlie Resnick is built of small, delicate images: a young mother warms her hands before touching her sleeping baby in a stone-cold council house; Resnick, foraging in the fridge for the makings of a sandwich, wistfully glances at the face of Billie Holiday on the front of a boxed set of CDs he has just bought himself for Christmas, though he has yet to purchase a CD player.
Harvey, a poet in thin disguise, constructs his plot masterfully, meeting our surprises in subplots that reach their conclusions with sudden, unsynchronous credibility."
Publishers Weekly
"While we love some characters because they are larger than life, and some because we can project our fantasies on them, we love Charlie Resnick because he's one of us — a human being, with a human beings flaws and virtues.
The pacing of the story is excellent, which means that you won't think about it until you've finished the book. All told, you lay down a John Harvey book at the end with that ineffable feeling of contentment that comes only from the best."
Barry Gardner Mostly Murder
"It's time to stop thinking of John Harvey as merely a writer of gritty police procedurals. Perhaps no one since Dickens has explored the British working class with greater insight or feeling, and both of those qualities are on view in this latest Inspector Charlie Resnick novel."
Booklist
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 | LIVING PROOF Resnick's hands are full enough, tracking down the prostitute who is stabbing her clients, without having to baby sit a strong-mouthed American crime writer, visiting the city with her husband, and prey to threats of violence. click for a larger cover |
US Hardback: Henry Holt (0-8050-2045-4) Paperback: St Martin's (0312-95863-3) UK Hardback: Heinemann (0434-00121-X) Paperback: Arrow (0-7493-1823-6) Arrow Reissue (0-09-942158-5) | |
Reviews
"An atmospheric British thriller which mischievously contrasts the true world of crime with the rather more mundane preoccupations of the mystery writers' conference, and a worthy addition to the increasingly indispensable Resnick series."
Maxim Jakubowski Time Out
"As usual in Harvey's novels, action takes second place to atmosphere and this story is more about relationships than catching criminals. While other writers force up the pace to make the pages turn, Harvey compels gently."
Susanna Yager Sunday Telegraph
"Resnick's personal sensitivities grow more interesting by the book.
So does Nottingham."
Marcel Berlins The Times
"Harvey's seventh procedural is smartly paced, slyly humorous, unsentimental about police work, violence, and other alienations of affection — altogether one of his best. Just like his first six."
Kirkus Reviews
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 | EASY MEAT Nicky Snape, a youth known to Resnick as a persistent small time thief, is arrested after a vicious attack on two elderly people; while in custody he takes his own life. The investigation into how and why this happened, becomes horrifyingly bound up with a series of male rapes which have been taking place in the city. Adding a little light to all this dark, Resnick finds himself becoming romantically involved with Hannah Campbell, one of Nicky's teachers. click for a larger cover |
US Hardback: Henry Holt (0-8050-4148-6) Paperback: Owl (0-8050-5495-2) UK Hardback: Heinemann (0-434-00314-X) Paperback: Mandarin (0-7493-2123-6) Arrow Reissue (0-09-942159-3) | |
"Harvey's 24-karat British procedurals have always led the field, but in his eighth he's surpassed himself with a likely Edgar nominee that just might win him the audience he's always deserved."
Kirkus Reviews
"A feeling for the here and now authentic enough to pack in a time capsule."
Philip Oakes Literary Review
"John Harvey's Inspector Charlie Resnick has by now practically assumed the sainthood of Chesterton's Father Brown. He's a wonderful creation, if unlikely for a cop, for he seems to feel the sorrows of our slipshod society on his nerve endings. · It's very much our post-Thatcher scene — shabby, flat and without dreams. · The ending, a ghastly example of the circularity of viciousness, is devastating. Yes, Harvey has his finger on the pulse all right."
Brian Case Time Out
"John Harvey's Easy Meat is a big, cruel book about life in the caring Nineties, set in Nottingham, a city which beats all records for crime. You might learn more about the lure and horror of urban violence from these pages than an undergraduate studying social science, but a degree of realistic pessimism does not prevent it from being hugely entertaining; in fact, it helps.
The contrasting, casual savagery of the youthful protagonists is chillingly described in their own vernacular: Harvey has the knack of translating the unspeakable impulse and he also describes policemen better than any writer on record.
This novel has joy, warmth and extreme violence: the compulsion to turn the page is almost painful."
Frances Hegarty The Mail on Sunday
"Operating somewhere between the police procedurals of P. D. James and the psychological thrillers of Ruth Rendell, fellow Briton Harvey claims a compelling turf: the nightmare streets of England on the dole.. · Det. Charlie Resnick pinches small victories from this urban slaughterhouse. It's a tale that will stay with a reader for a long time to come."
People Magazine
"Harvey's Resnick novels are far and away the finest British police procedurals yet written."
GQ
"The characters in John Harvey's urban crime novels are so defiantly alive and unruly that they put these British police procedurals on a shelf all by themselves.
'There's nothing people won't do to one another." says Inspector Charlie Resnick, the humane hero of this series. 'No dreadful thing.'
To his horror, Resnick discovers that even he, student of depravity that he is, can't comprehend the extent of the violence and degradation that are the inheritance of the Snapes of this world. As Resnick's eyes are opened, Mr Harvey writes with painful urgency about the kind of sexual and psychological abuse that no child can completely outgrow. If this is one of Mr. Harvey's darkest books, it is also one of his most enlightened."
Marilyn Stasio The New York Times Book Review
"But it is (Resnick's), and the book's, sensitivity to the lives of the chronically deprived that impresses most. The Snape family at the centre of Easy Meat is doomed to live out, at best, a miserable existence on the margins of mainstream society. The city's youth wander aimlessly, getting into trouble, with little hope for a better future.
The setting is Nottingham, but it represents any of a score of cities with a damaged social core and a police force struggling to keep abreast of problems that not of its making.
There is as much perceptive social and criminological insight in a Resnick novel as in many thick and expensive surveys. For all that, Easy Meat is not some bleeding-heart's manual, but a first-class crime story with a clever plot and believable characters, crafted by a writer in top form."
Marcel Berlins The Times
"Harvey should be named the poet laureate of the British underclass."
Bill Ott Booklist
"There is not a fudged character in Easy Meat · there's not a misconceived scene, not a single awkward sentence. All of which underscores how meticulously John Harvey crafts a novel.
But the transcendent thing about the Charlie Resnick series remains Charlie Resnick. Who can resist him— Honest, smart, brave, compassionate, he's even good-looking in a self-effacing way. Nor is his appeal lessened by a Columbo-like fashion sense. Wrinkles are permanently pressed in. Morals of food use his ties as way stations."
David Delman Philadelphia Inquirer
"John Harvey is one of those lucky writers who has a lot to say and knows how to say it. Harvey has a passionate heart, and a cool, investigative, unblinking eye."
Laurence Gough The Vancouver Sun
"The point is that when the city and its denizens sink into the moral abyss, as they plainly have done in Harvey's Resnick series, then the would-be truth-telling novel must plunge into the noir with them, or fail in its task. In other words: Crimes and Pulps can no longer be hived off as poor cousins to what writers such as Martin Amis and Patrick McGrath, with their manifestly literary pretensions, are up to. And, of course, if genre fiction's day has come, or come back, John Harvey is its eminence.
"As ever it falls to Charlie Resnick to create order and to cast some consoling light into this heart of darkness. And, as agents of order go, none comes more consoling than Resnick. He is the ordinary Joe, our common-man representative, an island of quotidian sanity, even of saving grace, in a cityscape nightmarishly pocked and scarred by sites of terrible crimes, a place crowded with other ordinary folk: the Normas, Nickies, Sheenas, Shanes and Franks, who have all gone off the rails to their own hurt and the hurt of the polis.
"Harvey's strength as a tour-guide to certain modern forms of hell benefits greatly from the way his prose stays as unflustered as Resnick does. Is that broke and bloodstained bottle retrieved from the undergrowth the one the murdered cop was buggered with— Then that brown stuff in the neck must be excrement as well as mud. The writing is shockingly explicit — as coolly plain-spoken as forensics must be. Here is no place, Harvey keeps insisting, for seemly mufflings of touch or squeamish turnings aside of the gaze. If there is a way to the better — Resnick and Harvey are at one with Hardy on this — it will exact a full look at the worst.
"John Harvey's terrifying vision of modernity is one which less lurid methods simply can't hope to reach."
Valentine Cunningham The Times Literary Supplement
"Without question, Easy Meat is John Harvey's best."
Jim Harrison
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 | STILL WATER The naked body of a young woman is found floating in the still waters of an inner-city canal. Not the first, nor the last. When another woman disappears, following a seminar on women and violence, everyone fears for her safety - especially those who know about her husband's controlling character. Is this a one-off domestic crime, or part of a wider series of murders— What else has been simmering beneath the surface of this couple's apparently normal middle class life— As Resnick explores deeper, he finds disturbing parallels between the couple he's investigating and his own evolving relationship with Hannah Campbell. click for a larger cover |
UK Hardback: Heinemann (0-434-00326-3) Arrow Reissue (0-09-942162-3) US Hardback: Henry Holt (0-8050-4149-4) | |
"Along with the Rebus novels of Ian Rankin and Bill James' Harper and Isles series,
John Harvey's Inspector Charlie Resnick sequence has set the benchmark for the British police procedural of the nineties.
With their dark, brooding backgrounds, their richly textured language and their insight into the human condition, all three provide riveting portraits of our contemporary urban landscape. · All his fans expect from Harvey is here in profusion: this is undoubtedly one of the crime novels of the year."
Val McDermid Manchester Evening News
"When Arena dubbed John Harvey 'the main man of British Crime' last year, we may have been selling him short. Over the course of his nine Charlie Resnick novels, he has proven to be as astute a chronicler of England's social canvas as any of the 'literary' novelists of the decade. By reinventing the police procedural genre, his series takes the temperature of its age, placing him in a tradition that owes as much to Dickens and it does to Conan Doyle."
Graham Caveney Arena
"The pace, prose and characterisation are superb."
Jon L. Breen Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
"John Harvey writes crime novels thick with subtext, packed with thematic challenge, and rich with real life. Another way to say that is, Harvey writes crime novels unlike anyone else.
Harvey has given us Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick, the nonpareil.
Resnick loves women, jazz and cats — probably in that order. And women love him. Bulky, somewhat clumsy, at times slow to move, and certainly slow to judge, he manages to make women feel understood. And so very protected.
In the hardscrabble city in the North of England that;s been Resnick's patch for fifteen years, a brutally murdered young female is fished out of a canal. It's an ugly crime that's soon connected to Charlie in an unexpectedly personal fashion.
So we get Charlie troubled. We also get Charlie in love and not finding it easy. But as always, we get Charlie stalwart and discovering ways to cope."
David Delman Philadelphia Inquirer
"His latest Charlie Resnick novel explores sexual violence and its devastating consequences. But Harvey presents more than a crime novel, weaving ideas as well as crimes and domestic details into a tapestry of intrigue and moral quandary.
While Harvey seamlessly presents Charlie's day of police work, the aspect of the novel that captures our attention is his relationship with Hannah, which shapes Charlie's view of the world. Hannah's open and passionate sexuality intimidates Charlie and provides us with a mirror image of society's difficulty in dealing forthrightly with sexual matters.
Harvey deliberately doesn't tie up all the loose ends, which reminds us that life is not always a neat and tidy series of events. Meanwhile, Still Water goes beyond crime fiction to provide a deeper perspective on the complexities of lust and love."
Peter Handel The San Francisco Chronicle
"Harvey has transcended the simple crime novel category, thanks primarily to his vividly portrayed characterizations and his unflinchingly realistic view of the world in which they work. It's not so much that Resnick is made compelling by his complexities as by his everyman dilemmas and work habits."
Michael Miller The State
"A work of unusual excellence"
Marcel Berlins The Times
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 | LAST RITES Guns and drugs on the streets, armed police and gang warfare. Into the midst of his lethal and heady mix, Michael Preston, sentenced to life for the murder of his father, is allowed our of prison for his mother's funeral and goes on the run. Heartsore and weary, Resnick struggles to keep the lid on an increasingly volatile city, while around him the local force is riven with petty rivalries and rumours of corruption; as if this weren't enough, his relationship with Hannah Campbell is on the wane and his friendship with colleague Lynn Kellogg becomes increasingly complex. click for a larger cover |
UK Hardback: Heinemann (0-434-00328-X) Arrow Reissue (0-09-942163-1) US Hardbadk: Henry Holt ISBN 0 8050 4150 8 | |
Reviews
"Last call for Charlie Resnick, pensioned off - figuratively speaking - after ten novels, but in such fearsome form that you're bound to wonder if Harvey hasn't pulled the plug too soon. No complaints about the book, though: heart-felt, hard-fought, heart-stopping, with Resnick hot on the heels of escapee Michael Preston, sentenced to life for the murder of his father, who jumps custody in a bid to regain a lost and illicit happiness. Subplots involving gang wars between wannabe druglords, in which men die and some sort of justice is done. Loose ends from previous books in the series skilfully and satisfactorily tied up. Scant time for sandwich consumption, though Resnick makes do with a confection of sun-dried tomatoes, aubergine, smoked ham and chunk of old cheese (Taleggio, if you care about such things) while resolving both his love life and his professional future. Without doubt the best cop on the Britcrime beat. Harvey has set a benchmark which the genre must now measure up to."
Philip Oakes Literary Review
"The narrative moves fluently, with tension skilfully built to a crescendo by the wholly believable behaviour of characters, rather than by the clever contrivances used by some writers. Resnick, with his jazz records and his gourmet sandwiches, is like an old friend and, in this case, familiarity breeds contentment."
Susanna Yager Sunday Telegraph
"Brings down the curtain on the best British ensemble police series. Set in a gritty urban East Midlands (Nottingham), acutely observed, often melancholy, always human, the Resnick books flow like a Duke Ellington suite. And if Resnick does not go out with a bang, it is far from a whimper."
Mike Ripley Sunday Telegraph
"Last Rites. Resnick's tenth case, is a rousing finale in which he mournfully unpicks a riddle involving child abuse, drug wars, racial tension and incest."
Jasper Rees Daily Telegraph
"Last Rites is a triumphant return to mid-season form. The disparate elements of the plot mesh smoothly together; narration is taut; tension is high; and a large cast of characters is brilliantly portrayed."
London Evening Standard
"A fitting final brick in the wall of what has been one of British crime fiction's most impressive series of the last decade. Autumnal, melancholy relationships and a murky web of fear dominate the proceedings as Harvey cruelly dissects the greyness of today's Britain. Resnick will be missed but deserves his fictional retirement."
Maxim Jakubowski Time Out
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Here are some thoughts about the series as a whole ·
"When I sat down to write "Lonely Hearts" the first of the Charlie Resnick novels, it was with a clear sense of purpose: what I wanted to do was write a story which would simultaneously be English in its content and American in its influences. Its place and people would recognisably belong to the time and place in which I was living, but the means of presenting them would be closer to those of writers such as Elmore Leonard and Ross Thomas - which is to say the narrative would be character-based and dialogue-driven and that it would be possible for the tone to shift between the quirkily humourous and the highly dramatic.topI was also impressed by the ways in which many American crime writers seemed able to convey a strong sense of a specific place and atmosphere in their work without resorting to the rather lengthy descriptive writing employed by some of their British counterparts. My home was in Nottingham at the time - my second spell of living in that city - and I had previously used it as a setting for a television series called "Hard Cases", which was a dramatic look at the work of probation officers and their clients, using a multi-strand narrative closely based upon that of "Hill Street Blues". What these programmes tried to do was marry the realistic feel of location filming - in itself a strong characteristic of much British film and television - with the fast pace and off-the-wall humour that was so much a part of "Hill Street Blues" success.
Once it became clear that the Resnick books were going to become an ongoing series - a sequence - I was confirmed in my intention of giving, through them, a picture of what living in a medium-sized, post-industrial British city was like in the post-Thatcher years. Most of the crimes I write about are ordinary and everyday; they are committed by ordinary, everyday people, and because I believe the roots of most crime are socio-economic, it makes sense that I write in what is largely a 'realist' mode. So while I'm tipping some kind of a stylistic hat at Leonard and Thomas and towards the writers of "Hill Street Blues" and their forerunners - Joseph Wambaugh and Ed McBain - much of my roots lie in that school of English heightened social realism which harks back to Dickens and which, in Nottingham, means that it's difficult not to be aware of Alan Sillitoe and the early D.H. Lawrence breathing down your neck as you walk across the Old Market Square or enter Yates' Wine Lodge of a Friday
night. "
Last Rites The final Resnick
People have been asking the inevitable question about finishing the series. Why— Why stop— I'll do my best to come up with an answer:
Perhaps most importantly, I don't live in Nottingham any more; I haven't done for - what— four years now. Some writers claim they can write about a place with greater clarity the further they are away from it, but for me it's the opposite. Of course, if my memory fails I can check the details on a map, look at photographs, make occasional day trips by train, but none of those compensate for being there in the city, letting it seep into your bones. For most of the seventeen years I was in Nottingham, certainly once I'd started working on the Resnick novels, I would stroll around the city most days, sit on buses, walk the walk that Resnick took down through the centre to the Italian coffee stall in the market and sit there, never making notes, but watching and listening, occasionally chatting, feeling - if never quite rightly - that I belonged.
Well, I don't belong any more. Not there. I'm back in North London, not such a stretch from where I was born and lived till my early twenties - and although only 120 or so miles from Nottingham as the proverbial crow flies, the atmosphere, the accent, the feeling are so different here that I can feel myself losing the particular sense of place that was so necessary to the Resnick books.
Then there's the question of freshness. Ten novels: ten years. Add the short stories, two television adaptations, three radio plays, writing about Resnick and his colleagues has accounted for most of my working life for a decade. I need to do something new, give myself a hearty kick up the backside. Even if I were able to carry on - and what I've said above suggests this wouldn't easily be the case - there would still be the problem of falling back too readily on the tried and tested, too many mornings when instead of pushing myself I'd yield to the laziness of repeating, with a few minor alterations, some riff, some piece of business simply because it had worked well before.
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The Resnick Short StoriesNow's The Time
Published in London Noir, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Serpent's Tail, London, 1994.
Reprinted in Das Grosse Lesebuch DesEnglischen Krimis, Goldmann, Germany, 1994; in Opening Shots (Editor: Laurence Block), Cumberland House, USA, 2000 and in First Cases, Volume 4 (Editor: Robert J. Randisi) NAL - Signet, USA, 2002.Resnick goes to London to the funeral of Ed Silver, the jazz saxophonist who appears in Cutting Edge.While there he encounters Brenda, a young runaway from Kirkby-in-Ashfield near Nottingham, now working as a prostitute around Kings Cross, and goes to hear Spike Robinson at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Soho.
Published in No Alibi, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Ringpull Press, Manchester, 1995. Also available in a limited, deluxe edition from Scorpion Press, Blakeney, Glos.
Resnick finally gets a CD player for his Billie Holiday Box Set, and becomes involved with the Snape family - Norma, a single mum bringing up three teenagers, Shane, Sheena and Nicky. It is Nicky, an adept and compulsive burglar at fifteen, who is the main focus of the story, falling foul of the tough Turvey family, who, when Nicky breaks into their house one time too many, finally take the law startlingly into their own hands. The Snape family went on to be central characters in Easy Meat.
Published in> Fresh Blood, edited by Mike Ripley & Maxim Jakubowski, The Do-Not Press, London, 1996. Reprinted in The Year's 25 Finest Crime & Mystery Stories, edited by the staff of Mystery Scene, Carroll & Graf, New York, 1996.
This features Raymond Cooke, Ray-o from Off Minor now nineteen and working for his Uncle Terry in a second-hand shop in Bobbers Mill, some of whose stock is decidedly stolen goods - which is where Resnick and his team come in. While Terry is enjoying a relationship with a young stripper called Eileen, Ray-o, unbeknown to Terry, is sleeping with Terry's thirteen year old daughter - a liaison with tragic results.
Published in The Orion Book of Murder, edited by Peter Haining, Orion, London, 1996.
Resnick and his team are investigating an armed robbery in the course of which two police officers were seriously injured. Resnick suspects that Terry Cooke is somehow involved, and uses one of his regular informants - an elderly, former dance band musician named Ronnie Rather - to check up on Terry's current state of mind. Worried, comes back the answer, stressed and worried, and not simply about his relationship with Eileen.
Published in "Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine", USA, May 1997. Re-printed in an anthology titled The Cutting Edge - A selection of the best recent stories from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in mid 1998 by Carroll & Graf.
This brings back Grabianski, the large and somewhat loveable burglar from Rough Treatment returned to Nottingham to steal a pair of coveted paintings and, as usual, falling unwisely in love, this time with Sister Teresa, a nun working in the community in civilian clothes. Both Grabianski and Sister Teresa - and the Dalzeil paintings - appear in Still Water.
Published in City of Crime, edited by David Belbin, Five Leaves Publications, Nottingham, June 1997.
This story introduces the magnificent Cheryl, who delivers meals-on-wheels to the elderly and infirm, wearing a scarlet embroidered leisure suit and singing along with Aretha Franklin just to cheer them up. When she finds out that one of her clients is being threatened by an unscrupulous loan shark, she sets out to put matters right, at first taking the law into her own hands - but when this proves dangerous, not just to Cheryl but also to her daughter, she goes to Resnick for help.
Published in Eine Leiche Zum Geburststag, Rowohlt, Germany, 1997.
This story stands on its own, but relates back to both She Rote & Confirmation; the world Terry Cooke had held precariously - and often illegally - together, is falling apart. Ray-O is troubled by the return of Terry's daughter, Sarah, whose own guilty secrets threaten to be uncovered; and Terry's ex-girlfriend Eileen is floundering about in the middle of it all, not knowing whether she can take a chance and trust Resnick or not.
This was to be published in Careless Whispers, edited by Ed Gorman, by Caroll & Graf in 1998, but the collection was put on hold and may or may not appear in the future under this or some other title!
This story has more about Terry Cook, one of the villains on Resnick's patch, and his young, ex-stripper girl friend, Eileen. Terry finds out that Ronnie Rather, and ex dance band musician and friend of Resnick, has informed on him and takes his revenge; meanwhile, Eileen is looking for a way out of her relationship with Terry and Resnick tries to persuade her that the best course for her to take is to help him put Terry behind bars. Also involved in this story, and, variously, with each other, are Kevin and Debbie Naylor, Anil Khan and his girl friend Jill.
Published in Mean Time, edited by Jerry Sykes, Do-Not Press, autumn 1998.
Resnick and the trials and illegal tribulations of a dwarf Elvis Presley impersonator who doubles as an excellent second-storey man!Published in Blue Lightning , edited by John Harvey, Slow Dancer Press, September 1998.
This is set in London and features police detective Jackie Ferris, who first saw the light of day in Still Water. She's now based in Kentish Town and investigating a con-man preying on women using the tube. A Nottingham connection brings Charlie to the capital to assist, and his particular knowledge of the Ellington Big Band personnel proves invaluable...
Slow Burn
Published in Now's the Time, Slow Dancer Press, September 1999A failing jazz club, long run by an old friend of Resnick's, goes up in smoke. Accident— Arson— Before Resnick can discover the answer, the body of a well-off local businessman is found dead in Colwick Wood. Suicide— Murder— And what, if any, is the connection between the two events—
Originally written as a radio script for BBC Radio 4, this novella-length version appears here in print for the first time.
Published in translation as a single volume, Billie's Blues, in France by Rivages/Noir in January, 2002.
Heinemann/Arrow published a new edition of Now's The Time in September, 2002, which included all of the above stories, including "Billie's Blues".Resnick investigates the murder of a young woman, whose body was found one snowy night on open ground near the centre of the city by Eileen, former stripper and girl friend of gangster Terry Cooke. In the course of the investigation, Eileen finds her own life in danger.
All of the above stories, save 'Billie's Blues', appear in Now's The Time, which was published by Slow Dancer Press in September 1999 in two editions - a B format paperback (ISBN 1 871033 53 5) and a strictly limited edition hardcover, 1000 copies only, 400 of them numbered and signed (ISBN 1 871033 58 6) This edition has now sold out and will not go into a second printing. Heinemann/Arrow intend to publish a new edition of Now's The Time in September, 2002. This will include all of the above stories, including "Billie's Blues".
Heinemann hardcover: (ISBN 0-434-01027-8)
Arrow paperback: (0-09-943556-X)
Well, You Needn’tPublished in a Finnish translation in O!, the magazine published by my Finnish publishers, Otava, for the 2004 Helsinki Book Fair.
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