I’ve just bought the final book in Graham Hurley’s brilliant – no, make that superlative – Faraday/Winter series. Happy Days is the twelfth book and if you haven’t read any then I recommend you start at the beginning. Of course in twelve books there are one or two not quite as good as the best, that’s inevitable. For me the series really took off when DC Paul Winter went over to the ‘dark side’ and joined Bazza MacKenzie. The devil plays the best tunes and so it has turned out, with Winter and MacKenzie becoming the stars of the series. There’s more than one reason why Happy Days is a little sad for fans (those who have read Borrowed Light will know one of them), but the good news is that one of the minor characters, DC Suttle, will feature in a new series. The young DC is moving to Dartmoor, of all places, so maybe I will bump into Hurley some time when I am doing some research up on the moor. Actually, I quite fancy Suttle walking into Major Crimes in Plymouth and meeting Savage and co..
Hurley has talked of realism in his novels; my style is different, more of a cross between police procedural and thriller, but I do try to get the police work as accurate as possible (within the confines of the story – poetic licence and all that). However, I don’t have Hurley’s wealth of contacts in the police that he has built up over the years… yet! In truth realism means not getting things wrong, rather than including all the details; to do that would be to send the reader to sleep and no writer wants to do that… authors of manuals for insomniacs aside.
