Dover: The Collected Short Stories [Paperback]

Joyce Porter (Author), Robert Barnard (Foreword)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Scotland Yard's Inspector Wilfred Dover may be the least heroic hero in mystery fiction. Grossly overweight and unfailingly surly, Dover insults those around him (especially his patient underling, Sergeant MacGregor) while also committing gaffes worthy of Inspector Clouseau. In these 11 stories, Dover commonly arrives at crime scenes just in time to quit for lunch, then naps while his assistants fret about such mundane matters as clues, motives and witnesses. In "Dover Tangles with High Finance," the inspector offends a gaggle of corporate directors whose chairman was poisoned. In the humbler precincts of "Dover Pulls a Rabbit," the porcine policeman must literally squeeze himself into a tiny cottage where a woman has been beaten to death-after which his unpleasant behavior actually leads to the culprit. Porter (1924-1990) makes her bumptious lout incredibly engaging. The solutions generally ring true, for Porter plants clues in the best British whodunit tradition, simultaneously honoring the genre's conventions even as she sends it up.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

For mystery fans who don't know Dover from his frequent appearances in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, here's an opportunity to make the acquaintance of one of the most delightfully funny heroes in all of detective fiction. Dover's creator, Joyce Porter, spent time in British military service, then turned to writing later in life. Her stories are masterpieces of subtlety, but it's her one-of-a-kind hero, Detective Inspector Wilfred Dover, who's the real attraction. Describing Dover is difficult, but imagine Nero Wolfe's curmudgeonly girth, Columbo's careless sloppiness, Sherlock Holmes' gloomy brilliance, and Rumpole's disillusionment with the system all rolled into one corpulent copper--that's Dover. Porter died in 1990, but her rapier sharp wit will live on in this engaging collection, which features the ill-tempered Dover at his crime-solving best. Teamed up with the luckless Sergeant MacGregor (think Morse's Lewis), Dover works his way through slaughtered spinsters, murdered moneymen, dead transvestites, and an assortment of other puzzling, provocative cases that will leave readers gasping--either with disbelief at Dover's sheer outrageousness or with laughter at his antics. A delight! Emily Melton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 306 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393337758
• ISBN-13: 978-0393337754
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,041,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dover In Miniature, June 21, 2010

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Phil Wernig (Canyon Country, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dover: The Collected Short Stories (Paperback)

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 had 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 recollections 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.
The volume under review is the first collection of the Dover short stories. The reader need not fear that Dover in miniature is any less gratifying than in the novels. Even in small doses, Dover is churlish, abusive, outrageous, unsavory, and delightful.