Alan Hunter was a prolific writer of police detective fiction with 46 books about Inspector George Gently of Scotland Yard who commenced as a mature officer and who managed to continue working from 1944 to 1999, although I not know if the later novels were set in the past. The BBC commissioned or bought four mini series of self contained dramas after seeing the pilot in 2007. Apart from 2009 when there were four episodes there have been two in the other three years, 11 in total.
Inspector Gently is no Wallander although Martin Shaw as Gently is as good as Kenneth Branagh, an actor who made his national name through the TV series of the Professionals as Raymond Doyle with Lewis Collins as Broadie and Gordon Sinclair as their CI5 boss George Cowley and a long way from Spooks. Doyle was recruited from the ranks of the police and later he was to star in the last three years of the series The Chief (Constable) and a long running battle with the Home Office. From this he graduated to a Judge, Judge John Deed and to more battles this time with Justice Department officials and Politicians who hated his independent mind and tendency to achieve the truth and Justice. So there is logic that he should also perform in the role as a confident, thoughtful successful villain catcher of the novels.
The novels are set in East Anglia and the Broads whereas the TV series was moved to the North East with the recent series set in the city of Durham although the County headquarters has long been located on a site on the outskirts of the city along with County Hall.
In Gently Upside Down the episode appears to be set in the 60-70’s era when young girls first started to wear colourful skirts and a regional TV show featured young people dancing to the latest records. Three young women become part of an audience where the director and his camera has a penchant for attempt find out if the girls are wearing knickers, something for which a national TV series achieved notoriety before attention was directed to Pan’s People. There was a TV rock and pop show in the North East but some two decades later called the Tube which featured a host of regional bands some from the North East who went onto national and some to International fame. In the Gently programme the director/producer takes a liking to one of the three friends and finds her frank and direct approach life in keeping with the changing times and moves her in as hostess forcing the aging professional and Lethario to throw in the towel and move back to London. In the North East The Tube was the starting point for Muriel Gray, Leslie Ash and more significantly Paula Yates other with Jules Holland as with the Tube, the TV show in episode becomes national
Now to the ploy having already mentioned three suspects for the murder of an exceptionally bright sixth former destined to Oxford who had disappeared with a small suitcase and whose body is discovered in shall grave in woodland.
There are six possible suspects for Gently to sort out in total. The producer director of the show in his thirties but with a definite eye for the girls. Then there is the former host also with a reputation for inviting the participating young females for a drink after the show and where there is evidence of an exchange of notes written on a beer glass mat between him and the deceased. He makes no secret of trying it on with the lasses at every opportunity but admits the murdered girl had knocked him back with her clever wit.
The third possibility is another bright girl at the school and friend rival of the dead girl. She is found to have lied about the evening of the disappearance claiming to have gone to the show with the third friend but had not done so. The fourth suspect is the music teacher as again it is shown that his alleged alibi of being at home with his wife and children is not so. However it is eventually established he was having an affair with the young woman offered a career in the TV show and alleged friend of the deceased.
The fifth suspect is the working class miner father of the girl who is shown to have lost his temper and hit the girl in the mouth the night she disappeared. There is the dark suggestion of an illicit relationship although he and his wife argued that they failed to understand or be able to communicate with their amazing daughter who lived in her world, with an ability to quote poetry lines to suit most situations and conversational exchanges. His frustration comes from never having had the opportunity for an education and to express his poetic soul, something which is revealed when his wife insists that he reads out what he wrote when their daughter was born.
This then brings the most likely suspect, the older English teacher of the girl and father of the young woman launched on a TV career. He becomes the chief suspect when it is discovered that over a decade before he had a relationship with a sixth form pupil of ability who now undertakes menial work as a single parent supporting her bright secondary school attending son. It is established that he did have a relationship with the dead girl and was the father of her unborn child and that the girl had packed the case with a view to moving into with the school master who wife had taken her life from mental troubles leaving her husband to bring up their two daughter, an elder daughter by many years who acted as house keeper to the rest of the family.
Yes and she did it. The girl had called at the home knowing the father and younger daughter were out to announce her intentions to the older sister/housekeeper and in effect to say she proposed to become step mother to a woman several years old. The depressed daughter perhaps taking after her mother had snapped and killed the girl unintentionally and then father full of remorse but also minded to protect his career, had attempted to bury the girl and deny any knowledge of what happened.
The format of this episode is similar to one of the early novels, the third in the series, Gently Down the Stream. As in the TV series Gently has an assistant, a sergeant. In the novel Dutt the assistant appears colourless, does a lot of hard work which brings rewards but never is able to put two and two together. In the TV series the assistant is not a likeable character. He messed up his marriage and fails as a bachelor now about Town. He is prepared to cross the line, breaking in to premises without a warrant and roughing up prisoners. He is an unlikely police detective. Another aspect of the book compared to the TV series is that the characters tend to be stock and one dimensional. Moreover I worked out who did it, and who therefore did not by page 65 of the 248.
A business man who can afford a Chauffer Cook, Housemaid and Gardener is identified as the victim of a fire on a one birth boat on the broads at the end of week’s hire. Gently is brought in when the pathologist determines that the man was shot and died before the fire. Gently discovers the man had hired the boat with his personal secretary who had disappeared and that shortly before the holiday the man had drawn several thousand pounds, a fortune at the time in the 1957 and had commenced to liquidate the business. It looked as if the couple were about to run away together although the girl and the chauffer had disappeared.
The disappearance of the chauffer suggested he had killed his employer for the money and because the man wanted to sack him because he was regarded a supporter of his legal wife who had recruited him. The young secretary was considered a possible accomplice having duped her employer.
Another possibility was the man’s son a poet and Oxford University student who did not get on with his father but he is ruled out when it is discovered he was checking on his mother because she was having an affair with the family solicitor. The daughter who is a fan of her father is unwilling to explain her full whereabouts on the evening of the murder The book portrays something of the life on the Broads, those hiring out boats and those making living in other ways.
Eventually the young woman, the secretary, is tracked down, living of her own and she attempts to take her own life and then gives the impression that she is the guilty one. But her personality and her way of life suggest otherwise and moreover there has been another murder of a woman who appears to have found something out. And who has passed on some money, money which it looks belonged to the dead man. Then of course it is worked out.
The business man is not dead and is posing as someone else in disguise. His daughter is an accomplice to the deception because she is an amateur actress. She had been accidentally discovered by the woman and she had to die also. What I do not understand is why the two did not just run off together. Everyone would have been with that.
Nearly all the novels have Gently in the title and I do not know if they feature someone else or the writer could not think of a suitable title to make a play on Gently. In Goodbye China. China is a solitary man, considered to be a tramp, who is found dead. This is not so much a dun it but you prove it and what is there to prove. We are given aspects of the truth as the episode progresses. A large young man of limited abilities living in a residential institution goes to the kitchen one night and there discovers two brothers messing abut looking for something to steal. Recognising the youth as a simpleton they tie him up take him out to a park where there is one of those old wooden roundabouts where the young man is placed and is pushed round and around as fast as possible, something that he hates.
The bullying is seen by an old man who lives in lodgings nearby overlooking what has happened and he cones down to remonstrate. The boy with mental disabilities always has with him a pack of cigarette cards, a full set which he likes to look at in their order one to 50 in rows. These falls out and the youth attempts to gather them together but one of the attackers prevents him and the old man gathers some and attempts to return them. The young man is enraged at what has happened, lashes out and the old man falls, hits his head and dies.
The boy is the only child of a local senior police officer and his wife who they usually look after but placed in the institution for the occasional night or weekend if they are away and unable keep him with them. They are devoted to the young man in other circumstances. The officer is known to Gently from their previous experience together in the Met and they have mutual high regard. The officer finds out what happened. The two attackers have become out of control of their father, a pig farmer, since their mother left home with another. They have gone off the rails since always getting into trouble with the police. But Gently finds there is no record and that the area appears to have far fewer convictions for youth crime than would be expected. The police are operating an illegal and secret corporal punishment system with the approval of parents as an alternative to the young people gaining a record.
The father had allowed the two tearaways to be taken by an assistant to a senior police officer two an approved school where one of the staff allows the boys to be held in no longer used holding cells in the basement and where are kept the instruments of birching from the time when they would be part of the sentencing of the young people. The reason why police have access is because the wife of the assistant is having an affair with the staff member.
Unfortunately the two young men refuse to be broken by the physical punishment and therefore there is continuing risk that they will reveal what happened and therefore the son could face a charge of manslaughter or be removed from their direct care because of his temper and potential danger to others. Worse still one of the young men commits suicide and his body is taken away and held at the local mortuary with a sympathetic coroner treating the case as a the death of unknown individual.
At first the assistant wants to take the blame for the involvement of his superior, He has nothing to live for as his wife is establishing a new life with the staff member the Approved school. However when she sees his willingness to take responsibility and his continuing love for her she is prepared to stand by him although he will lose his job and go to prison for his part in what has been happening. The former colleague pleads to let matters rest because if he goes to prison, his wife will not be able to cope with the son and the boy will become a permanent resident of an institution. The sergeant suggests that they do walk away but Gently arrests his friend. Gently is not the virtuous one authorising the Sergeant to break into the residence of the Pig farmer when he is not there to try and find evidence about the whereabouts of the brothers. He finds some of the cigarette cards which Gently had previously seen in a drawer when inspecting the bedroom but had not appreciated their significance until seeing the son of the former colleague playing with part of the same set of cards.
The episode ends with Gently working out where the old man had lived and spending time in his room. The man had been an informant for Gently in times past and they had become friends in the way that an Inspector can become friendly with an informant. The man was however grateful for the help that Gently had given to starting a new life.
Gently by the Shore is the second of the publish novels in the series. A body is washed up on the beach of a seaside resort and no one comes forward to identify the individual who has been stabbed four times. The reason being that he arrived in the town wearing a beard.
The local police are forced to call in Gently because of publicity about the case although they regard the matter as a routine checking of what has been done and confirmation that without any leads or identification the mystery will remain unsolved. Slowly Gently unravels a case of international intrigue.
To the amazement and denials of the local constabulary Gently uncovers that the town is the headquarters of a secret organisation bent on taking power. The chief is someone who owns the local arcade and alcoholic drinking bar frequented by low life’s and dodgy characters including a blond prostitute from London up for the holiday season with her pimp Peachey. Under threats of death she had lured the man, an American of central European background to a condemned home on the cliff which experts anticipated would fall into the sea at any moment because of coastal erosion. The murderer, a man with a facial scar, had attempted to skip the country after lying low until the publicity and the Inspector and gone away.
He is caught by the British security service who had been investigating the activities of the organisation with the help of Interpol. They were after the top man in the UK but were prepared to settle for the murderer.
Gently persuades them to release the prostitute on the basis that she and the pimp will be at risk from the boss who it is hoped will show his hand which of course he does attempting to use the same knife or kind of knife as used to kill the man on the shore. Of course there are lots of twists and turns involving several characters and a sub plot of counterfeit $100 bills with two local minor villains braking in to try and find the rest of the loot and hen being implicated in the murder by the actual villains who take back the money from where it was hidden and replacing it with the clothing of the naked man on the shore.
Gently triumphs having kept quite at a top level meeting between the local Chief Constable and team and the National security people, until the opportune moment when he reveals that he knows who the leader is and how to catch him. There is a good portrait of a season town in the early fifties.
Martin Shaw is excellent as the Inspector and the writers and directors manage to engage the audience with characters who interest so that we overlook flaws in the plots. I was not engaged in similar manner by the novels although those were the early ones and I shall try and find some of his later works especially any where the TV series has been based to come to a final conclusion.
Inspector Gently is no Wallander although Martin Shaw as Gently is as good as Kenneth Branagh, an actor who made his national name through the TV series of the Professionals as Raymond Doyle with Lewis Collins as Broadie and Gordon Sinclair as their CI5 boss George Cowley and a long way from Spooks. Doyle was recruited from the ranks of the police and later he was to star in the last three years of the series The Chief (Constable) and a long running battle with the Home Office. From this he graduated to a Judge, Judge John Deed and to more battles this time with Justice Department officials and Politicians who hated his independent mind and tendency to achieve the truth and Justice. So there is logic that he should also perform in the role as a confident, thoughtful successful villain catcher of the novels.
The novels are set in East Anglia and the Broads whereas the TV series was moved to the North East with the recent series set in the city of Durham although the County headquarters has long been located on a site on the outskirts of the city along with County Hall.
In Gently Upside Down the episode appears to be set in the 60-70’s era when young girls first started to wear colourful skirts and a regional TV show featured young people dancing to the latest records. Three young women become part of an audience where the director and his camera has a penchant for attempt find out if the girls are wearing knickers, something for which a national TV series achieved notoriety before attention was directed to Pan’s People. There was a TV rock and pop show in the North East but some two decades later called the Tube which featured a host of regional bands some from the North East who went onto national and some to International fame. In the Gently programme the director/producer takes a liking to one of the three friends and finds her frank and direct approach life in keeping with the changing times and moves her in as hostess forcing the aging professional and Lethario to throw in the towel and move back to London. In the North East The Tube was the starting point for Muriel Gray, Leslie Ash and more significantly Paula Yates other with Jules Holland as with the Tube, the TV show in episode becomes national
Now to the ploy having already mentioned three suspects for the murder of an exceptionally bright sixth former destined to Oxford who had disappeared with a small suitcase and whose body is discovered in shall grave in woodland.
There are six possible suspects for Gently to sort out in total. The producer director of the show in his thirties but with a definite eye for the girls. Then there is the former host also with a reputation for inviting the participating young females for a drink after the show and where there is evidence of an exchange of notes written on a beer glass mat between him and the deceased. He makes no secret of trying it on with the lasses at every opportunity but admits the murdered girl had knocked him back with her clever wit.
The third possibility is another bright girl at the school and friend rival of the dead girl. She is found to have lied about the evening of the disappearance claiming to have gone to the show with the third friend but had not done so. The fourth suspect is the music teacher as again it is shown that his alleged alibi of being at home with his wife and children is not so. However it is eventually established he was having an affair with the young woman offered a career in the TV show and alleged friend of the deceased.
The fifth suspect is the working class miner father of the girl who is shown to have lost his temper and hit the girl in the mouth the night she disappeared. There is the dark suggestion of an illicit relationship although he and his wife argued that they failed to understand or be able to communicate with their amazing daughter who lived in her world, with an ability to quote poetry lines to suit most situations and conversational exchanges. His frustration comes from never having had the opportunity for an education and to express his poetic soul, something which is revealed when his wife insists that he reads out what he wrote when their daughter was born.
This then brings the most likely suspect, the older English teacher of the girl and father of the young woman launched on a TV career. He becomes the chief suspect when it is discovered that over a decade before he had a relationship with a sixth form pupil of ability who now undertakes menial work as a single parent supporting her bright secondary school attending son. It is established that he did have a relationship with the dead girl and was the father of her unborn child and that the girl had packed the case with a view to moving into with the school master who wife had taken her life from mental troubles leaving her husband to bring up their two daughter, an elder daughter by many years who acted as house keeper to the rest of the family.
Yes and she did it. The girl had called at the home knowing the father and younger daughter were out to announce her intentions to the older sister/housekeeper and in effect to say she proposed to become step mother to a woman several years old. The depressed daughter perhaps taking after her mother had snapped and killed the girl unintentionally and then father full of remorse but also minded to protect his career, had attempted to bury the girl and deny any knowledge of what happened.
The format of this episode is similar to one of the early novels, the third in the series, Gently Down the Stream. As in the TV series Gently has an assistant, a sergeant. In the novel Dutt the assistant appears colourless, does a lot of hard work which brings rewards but never is able to put two and two together. In the TV series the assistant is not a likeable character. He messed up his marriage and fails as a bachelor now about Town. He is prepared to cross the line, breaking in to premises without a warrant and roughing up prisoners. He is an unlikely police detective. Another aspect of the book compared to the TV series is that the characters tend to be stock and one dimensional. Moreover I worked out who did it, and who therefore did not by page 65 of the 248.
A business man who can afford a Chauffer Cook, Housemaid and Gardener is identified as the victim of a fire on a one birth boat on the broads at the end of week’s hire. Gently is brought in when the pathologist determines that the man was shot and died before the fire. Gently discovers the man had hired the boat with his personal secretary who had disappeared and that shortly before the holiday the man had drawn several thousand pounds, a fortune at the time in the 1957 and had commenced to liquidate the business. It looked as if the couple were about to run away together although the girl and the chauffer had disappeared.
The disappearance of the chauffer suggested he had killed his employer for the money and because the man wanted to sack him because he was regarded a supporter of his legal wife who had recruited him. The young secretary was considered a possible accomplice having duped her employer.
Another possibility was the man’s son a poet and Oxford University student who did not get on with his father but he is ruled out when it is discovered he was checking on his mother because she was having an affair with the family solicitor. The daughter who is a fan of her father is unwilling to explain her full whereabouts on the evening of the murder The book portrays something of the life on the Broads, those hiring out boats and those making living in other ways.
Eventually the young woman, the secretary, is tracked down, living of her own and she attempts to take her own life and then gives the impression that she is the guilty one. But her personality and her way of life suggest otherwise and moreover there has been another murder of a woman who appears to have found something out. And who has passed on some money, money which it looks belonged to the dead man. Then of course it is worked out.
The business man is not dead and is posing as someone else in disguise. His daughter is an accomplice to the deception because she is an amateur actress. She had been accidentally discovered by the woman and she had to die also. What I do not understand is why the two did not just run off together. Everyone would have been with that.
Nearly all the novels have Gently in the title and I do not know if they feature someone else or the writer could not think of a suitable title to make a play on Gently. In Goodbye China. China is a solitary man, considered to be a tramp, who is found dead. This is not so much a dun it but you prove it and what is there to prove. We are given aspects of the truth as the episode progresses. A large young man of limited abilities living in a residential institution goes to the kitchen one night and there discovers two brothers messing abut looking for something to steal. Recognising the youth as a simpleton they tie him up take him out to a park where there is one of those old wooden roundabouts where the young man is placed and is pushed round and around as fast as possible, something that he hates.
The bullying is seen by an old man who lives in lodgings nearby overlooking what has happened and he cones down to remonstrate. The boy with mental disabilities always has with him a pack of cigarette cards, a full set which he likes to look at in their order one to 50 in rows. These falls out and the youth attempts to gather them together but one of the attackers prevents him and the old man gathers some and attempts to return them. The young man is enraged at what has happened, lashes out and the old man falls, hits his head and dies.
The boy is the only child of a local senior police officer and his wife who they usually look after but placed in the institution for the occasional night or weekend if they are away and unable keep him with them. They are devoted to the young man in other circumstances. The officer is known to Gently from their previous experience together in the Met and they have mutual high regard. The officer finds out what happened. The two attackers have become out of control of their father, a pig farmer, since their mother left home with another. They have gone off the rails since always getting into trouble with the police. But Gently finds there is no record and that the area appears to have far fewer convictions for youth crime than would be expected. The police are operating an illegal and secret corporal punishment system with the approval of parents as an alternative to the young people gaining a record.
The father had allowed the two tearaways to be taken by an assistant to a senior police officer two an approved school where one of the staff allows the boys to be held in no longer used holding cells in the basement and where are kept the instruments of birching from the time when they would be part of the sentencing of the young people. The reason why police have access is because the wife of the assistant is having an affair with the staff member.
Unfortunately the two young men refuse to be broken by the physical punishment and therefore there is continuing risk that they will reveal what happened and therefore the son could face a charge of manslaughter or be removed from their direct care because of his temper and potential danger to others. Worse still one of the young men commits suicide and his body is taken away and held at the local mortuary with a sympathetic coroner treating the case as a the death of unknown individual.
At first the assistant wants to take the blame for the involvement of his superior, He has nothing to live for as his wife is establishing a new life with the staff member the Approved school. However when she sees his willingness to take responsibility and his continuing love for her she is prepared to stand by him although he will lose his job and go to prison for his part in what has been happening. The former colleague pleads to let matters rest because if he goes to prison, his wife will not be able to cope with the son and the boy will become a permanent resident of an institution. The sergeant suggests that they do walk away but Gently arrests his friend. Gently is not the virtuous one authorising the Sergeant to break into the residence of the Pig farmer when he is not there to try and find evidence about the whereabouts of the brothers. He finds some of the cigarette cards which Gently had previously seen in a drawer when inspecting the bedroom but had not appreciated their significance until seeing the son of the former colleague playing with part of the same set of cards.
The episode ends with Gently working out where the old man had lived and spending time in his room. The man had been an informant for Gently in times past and they had become friends in the way that an Inspector can become friendly with an informant. The man was however grateful for the help that Gently had given to starting a new life.
Gently by the Shore is the second of the publish novels in the series. A body is washed up on the beach of a seaside resort and no one comes forward to identify the individual who has been stabbed four times. The reason being that he arrived in the town wearing a beard.
The local police are forced to call in Gently because of publicity about the case although they regard the matter as a routine checking of what has been done and confirmation that without any leads or identification the mystery will remain unsolved. Slowly Gently unravels a case of international intrigue.
To the amazement and denials of the local constabulary Gently uncovers that the town is the headquarters of a secret organisation bent on taking power. The chief is someone who owns the local arcade and alcoholic drinking bar frequented by low life’s and dodgy characters including a blond prostitute from London up for the holiday season with her pimp Peachey. Under threats of death she had lured the man, an American of central European background to a condemned home on the cliff which experts anticipated would fall into the sea at any moment because of coastal erosion. The murderer, a man with a facial scar, had attempted to skip the country after lying low until the publicity and the Inspector and gone away.
He is caught by the British security service who had been investigating the activities of the organisation with the help of Interpol. They were after the top man in the UK but were prepared to settle for the murderer.
Gently persuades them to release the prostitute on the basis that she and the pimp will be at risk from the boss who it is hoped will show his hand which of course he does attempting to use the same knife or kind of knife as used to kill the man on the shore. Of course there are lots of twists and turns involving several characters and a sub plot of counterfeit $100 bills with two local minor villains braking in to try and find the rest of the loot and hen being implicated in the murder by the actual villains who take back the money from where it was hidden and replacing it with the clothing of the naked man on the shore.
Gently triumphs having kept quite at a top level meeting between the local Chief Constable and team and the National security people, until the opportune moment when he reveals that he knows who the leader is and how to catch him. There is a good portrait of a season town in the early fifties.
Martin Shaw is excellent as the Inspector and the writers and directors manage to engage the audience with characters who interest so that we overlook flaws in the plots. I was not engaged in similar manner by the novels although those were the early ones and I shall try and find some of his later works especially any where the TV series has been based to come to a final conclusion.
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