Joyce Porter served in the Royal Air Force for 14 years. Later in life she enjoyed the travel that accompanied her international acclaim as a writer. It was therefore fitting that when she passed away in 1990 it was aboard an airplane, not in a crash but of a virus she contracted on a visit to China.
Porter’s great gift to her literary fans was Scotland Yard’s “least wanted man”, Detective Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover, who, from 1964 to 1985, in ten novels and eleven short stories, embarrassed his superiors, mortified his assistant, shocked local constabularies, and terrorized everyone associated with his murder investigations, the innocent quite as well as the guilty.
Dover was Oliver Hardy gone curdled: obese, obnoxious, cheap, lazy, incompetent, unhygienic, and omnivorous. With his pestilent bowler hat, his shabby, wrinkled black suit, his muddy, smelly boots, his fetid breath, and his Fuhrer mustache, he approached every case with the single-minded aim of getting it off the books as quickly as possible with the least inconvenience to himself. In his view, everyone was a culprit who deserved a browbeating until someone had sense enough to confess. If he had his druthers – which he stated plainly unless lying served him better, or pitiful whining, craven pleading, heartfelt complaints, and brutal threats went unavailing – he would simply have locked every suspect – man, woman, or child – in a small room and thumped them with a rubber truncheon until the truth was out.
Unfortunately for Dover that technique was frowned upon by the great British public, who insisted on rather annoying standards of humane behavior toward their criminal class that Dover found to be nothing but a nuisance to his methods and an impediment to his goal, that of retirement with full pension.
Dover’s excesses were curbed only by his long-suffering assistant, the prim, proper, courteous, educated, and elegant Detective Sergeant MacGregor. It was bad enough for MacGregor that his association with Dover stymied his professional ambition. His indignities were compounded by the tendency of the Yard to dispatch Dover to homicides well off the well-trod path in dreary localities whose principal features were inclement weather and acute shortage of amenities. One might almost suspect that Dover’s masters quite relished his prolonged absences from the office. For his part, Dover bitterly resented his energetic assistant’s diplomacy, observance of legal niceties, and evidence-gathering efforts. He cast a jaundiced eye on MacGregor,who cherished the quaint notion that justice should be the outcome of criminal investigations while Dover’s unshaken certainty was that arrests and, when the overly sympathetic courts would allow, convictions were the entire point. Dover reckoned that whether or not the accused was actually guilty was none of his business.
Joyce Porter was raised in a northern English village typical of the setting where most of the Dover whodunits unfold. Her keen ear for idiomatic speech and her sharply affectionate recollection of small town eccentrics enliven the caricatures that populate her stories. Her humor shines not merely in the preposterous Dover and his surly manners, but in the finely wrought prejudices and predilections of the minor characters.
Dover – The Collected Short Stories (1995) is the first aggregate of the short pieces. The reader need not fear that Dover in miniature is any less gratifying than in the novels. Even is small doses, Dover is churlish, abusive, outrageous, unsavory, and delightful.
(Review posted on Amazon.com, June 2010)
Naked Express 