The Chalon Heads: 4 (Brock & Kolla Mystery) - Softcover

The Marx Sisters, Barry Maitland's premier crime fiction outing, gleaned the kind of praise that many authors would kill for, even being short listed for the prestigious John Creasey award for best first novel. So the task of following up such a success must have been daunting--and Maitland pulled off the trick triumphantly in the equally accomplished The Malcontenta and All My Enemies. And many readers will discover that The Chalon Heads is incontrovertibly the most compelling Maitland novel yet. The detectives he has featured in this series are a wonderfully drawn team: the rumpled, brilliant detective Chief Inspector Brock and his intuitive, insightful colleague, Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla. The relationship between the two is always adroitly characterised, with Kolla's silent appraisal of her abrupt colleague a recurrent theme:

He might have been an uncle, Kathy thought, or a schoolmaster, a big benign bear of a man in a slightly rumpled suit, grey beard and hair in need of a trim, as unlike the hard young man of Serious Crime as can be and therefore dangerous in a different way.

In this fourth book, Brock and Kolla have been called to a shop dealing in rare stamps on the assumption they'll be handling a simple case of theft. But a man from Brock's past, Chinese East End ex-villain Sammy Starling, comes to him for help when Starling's vivacious young wife is kidnapped. The ransom notes are decorated with the rare and priceless Chalon Head stamps of the young Queen Victoria and the duo begins to make connections. Sammy believes a bent police officer is behind the kidnapping and soon the reader is plunged into a lively and complex narrative that covers issues of corruption in the Force, the difficulties faced by the police when dealing with a deeply unhelpful public and even questions involving the very nature of good and evil.

Maitland has been quietly reinventing the genre of the police procedural and creating something quirkier and more carefully crafted than most entries in the field. This latest novel is perhaps the best plotted yet, with dialogue still a strong suit:

"You've got to remember what it was like then, Kathy. In 1960 there were no more than two or three hundred drug addicts known to the Home Office in the whole of England and Wales. Think of that! Today there's probably more than that in Budleigh Salterton. And those addicts were mostly old folks who had become dependent on their painkillers. Ten years later, there were thousands, almost all under the age of 30."

--Barry Forshaw

Barry Maitland was born in Scotland and brought up in London. After studying architecture at Cambridge, he practised and taught in the UK before moving to Australia where he is Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle.