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THE LOLITA MAN

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This second entry in James' lengthy (20+ books) "Harpur + Iles" series takes place not too long after the first ("You'd Better Believe It) and finds DCS Colin Harpur and his colleagues in a fictional small seaside city on England's southern coastline picking up the pieces after the fifth rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in the last several months. In the first book James also employed this device of dropping the reader into the middle of a case, and it's a nice change of pace from most writers, who like to build everything up from the very begining. Clearly, Harpur and the gang have been chasing the titular killer for quite some time now, and aren't getting anywhere. It also becomes evident that two of the killings occured in an adjacent county, where the police force is headed by Catholics, one of whom may be in line to take over Chief Barton's place once he retires (which he's vowed to do as soon as the killer is caught). This puts the virulantly careerist and cynical Assistant Chief Iles in a lather, as he can't stand the idea of "Micks" and "Papists" taking over the place. This bitter rivalry works both ways, since Barton and Illes are Freemasons, which the county cops loathe -- and the upshot of all this is that there is zero cooperation between the two investigations.

At times the perspective switches to the killer himself, whose inner ramblings give some form of character to what might otherwise be a faceless monster, and his delusional motivations make much more sense than most serial killer plots. The reader is also taken into the mind of the killer's next target, a young teenage girl who writes florid naive romantic scenarios in her diary. In both cases, James nails the voice of the characters and makes the situation quite beleivable (which is always the hardest part of a serial killer plot). Meanwhile, Harpur is left to lurch around the city aimlessly guessing at where the killer may strike next. This is rather in keeping with the first book, which also found him totally bewildered at times, and adrift in a morally grey zone involving informers. (Actually, this is one aspect I was a little dissapointed to find missing. In "You'd Better Believe It", Harper uses informers quite a bit, and I was expecting him to call upon his underworld contact here as well, although that might have smacked too much of the classic film "M"...) Eventually the investigation starts leading somewhere, and as it does, the rivalry subplot grows more and more important and Iles starts to suspect Harpur of cooperation with the Catholic cops, leading to some very nasty exchanges. Indeed, in the first book Iles was always lurking in the background, but here he blossoms as a full character with some of the most off-the-wall dialogue to be found in a crime novel. His switching back and forth between saying the correct thing in public and the most nasty cynical thing in private is so fluid that one is reminded of some Shakespearean character alternating between adressing another character and the audience. It's dazzling and deeply harsh and cynical stuff.

The nature of the plot brings Harpur's family much more into the fore, as well as Harpur's mistress, who was established in the first book. At a fast-reading158 pages, probably the main flaw in the series is that it seems like each book only has space to develop two or three characters in any depth, so you kind of have to fit the cast together from the various books. The plot all comes together in a cascade of luck and persistance from Harpur, but by the end Iles is so furious with him that one wonders how their relationship can last another 18 books! I'll definitely be picking up the next, "Halo Parade", to find out.

Originally published in 1986, "The Lolita Man" was the second of James's long-running series of "Harper & Iles mysteries" which as of 2008 numbers twenty-five titles. A 79-year-old Welshman and former newspaperman whose real name is James Tucker (under which name he published a study of Anthony Powell), James is nothing like his contemporaries P. D. James and Ruth Rendell. He is not absorbed with motive nor does he have a young girl's murder serve as a pretext for an investigation of something more interesting. His prose is not elegant but angular and unadorned, and his Britain has less in common with Adam Dalgliesh's than with Theodore Dalrymple's. Crime is not an isolated incident there, but a rising tide that the police are nearly powerless to hold back. "The detective is dead," Iles explains in the novel by that title.

"Which detective?" Harpur replies. "I hadn't heard."

"Jerk. The detective as species. . . . Courts won't hear confessions, they throw out informant cases, still give every career villain the right to silence, disbelieve police evidence as a matter of course. Judges disallow material recorded in trap situations--alleging we're provocateurs. Juries are threatened and bribed. Villains keep special insurance funds for nobbling them. Where's detection?"

The best the police can hope for is gunplay, so they can shoot too; they plant evidence where necessary; they do whatever they can to avoid going to trial. Not likely to please the civil libertarians, as Iles acknowledges, but there is something more important than approved procedure. Quoting Halifax's "Character of a Trimmer," he insists that the law must be "in good hands"--his and Harpur's, not the lawyers'. The point is not, as cliché has it, that a thin line separates law enforcement from "crookedness"; but rather that the line separating them is not procedural.

James's best novel is "Roses, Roses," the tenth in the Harpur & Iles series. In "The Lolita Man," James was still experimenting, still searching for the right approach. His signature technique of alternating chapters, though, was already in place--Harpur's investigation alternates with diary entries by a fourteen-year-old girl who is being stalked by the Lolita Man--but James also tries something daring. Starting with the fifth chapter, he lets the pedophile speak for himself. Commences then a complex and suspenseful three-way dance in which the Lolita Man stalks the girl, who knows she is being watched by the man she calls Mr Dark Eyes, but who is also (unbeknownst to her) being watched by Harpur, who suspects that she may be the next victim, and who is known and watched by the Lolita Man, whom Harpur does not know.

James's Lolita Man is a patient watchful stranger in need of love, not help ("love, only love, love from a girl, a girl not too old, a girl really young, a gentle and kind girl from a nice private school with high class navy and red uniform, a girl who has not been playing around with boys, letting them close to her, using foul language"). He lives in a "tomb alone" until he finds the "right girl," but when he does he is properly thankful:

"Tonight in my prayers I gave thanks that I have been able to find her among so many. Please God let it be that I do not lose her. Do not send me back to that black pit. Prayer is such a help in my life."

The voice is much creepier than the "first Lolita man" (to use Harpur's phrase). Nabokov's Humbert Humbert is aware of the "cesspool of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile." A part of him knows in advance that "nothing but pain and horror would result from the expected rapture" with his Lolita. Nor is he totally cut off from the human nexus. "Imagine me," he beseeches his readers; "I shall not exist if you do not imagine me. . . ." Nabokov's _Lolita_ is dedicated to the proposition that imagination might be redemptive, recreating time backwards, transfiguring a monster, giving a dead girl eternal life in a book bearing her name.

James's vision is entirely different. In his world, imagination cannot make the monstrous wonderful again; to believe otherwise, as Iles puts it, is "eyewash"; the truth about human society--the "dark pressures" of experience--are stronger and more lasting.

And James's Lolita Man is the greater monster, because he does not think of himself as a monster. He believes, in fact, that he is "the only one who can save [the girl he is stalking]." He finally moves to snatch her when he reflects that "I haven't done enough for her, only watching." He must protect her from Harpur, whom he suspects of wanting "dirty sex" with her. He breaks into her room, thrilling her ("I could smell some strong tobacco in my room like they use in those French cigarettes") but leaving himself distraught at not finding her there.

At this point the alternating chapters suddenly stop and Harpur is left alone with the sound of his own voice, unable to locate the girl he has been tailing. For some thirty-five pages, nothing is heard from either of them--the girl or Mr Dark Eyes. The effect is chilling. How will it end? Not in any way calculated to satisfy expectations. James's novels never do. But the ending does raise a troubling problem. Namely: how much to redeem with imagination, and how much to let the truth have.

This is #2 in the 19 book Harpur/Iles series of hard-edged British police procedurals by Bill James. That fact that I acquired all 19 after reading just one speaks loads about my perspective on this series. Considering this review was written the morning after virtually the entire top command structure of the SFPD was indicted by a grand jury, perhaps James reccuring cynical theme of moral ambiguity amongst the "good guys", even in the throes of trying to stop a serial child murder, is all too close to art imitating life.
Anyway, a crackling good read if you don't mind the cynicism inherent in James' perspective that the thin blue line is actually grey....very grey.

Detective Colin Harpur?s group of local cops is faced with a serial killer who goes after teenage girls. Harpur and his boss Iles are hard at work to solve the case before their competition, the county cops, get there. Of course, Harpur is the man to finally get hold of the murderer, by sheer deduction from seemingly valueless clues.

This is a funny book, because the author has a good sense of humor. What?s more, he also writes in good, clear language. But a thrilling mystery that keeps you breathless it is not. For that it ambles along too complacently.

A friend mentioned Bill James' Harpur and Iles books -- English police procedurals described as the "Dance to the Music of Time of mysteries" -- to me. What an irresistible recommendation (see my reviews of the Anthony Powell books for why)! I decided to give them a try.

Thus I have just read _The Lolita Man_, which is number two in the series. The plot concerns a serial rapist and killer who preys on schoolgirls in the town where Harpur and Iles work. Iles is the Assistant Chief, while Harpur is one of his top subordinated, a detective superintendent or something. Iles is a rather nasty man, consumed with careerist passion and a bitter rivalry with the neighboring county police department, this last rivalry enhanced because their Chief is ready to retire and he is concerned that the Assistant Chief from the county will get the job ahead of him. Moreover, Iles is a Mason, and the top men at the county are Roman Catholics, so Iles' speech is larded with mean remarks about "Papists" and "Micks", not to mention cynical remarks about avoiding the appearance of racism etc etc. That said, he seems to be a very well-read man (allowing him to drop in a cute Anthony Powell reference, calling Harpur one of the "Afternoon Men" -- that being the title of Powell's first novel).

Harpur is the main point of view character, and much more sympathetic. He is carrying on an affair with the widow of one of his subordinates, a man who died botching a case -- but he seems decent, and it's made clear that his wife is cheating on him as well, and he treats his lover nicely. As a cop, he appears honest and hardworking, and much put upon by Iles, not least because he won't join the Masonic Lodge.

The main action of the book pivots around Harpur's conviction that the "Lolita Man"'s next target might be a friend of his daughters. The reader is given a look at the Lolita Man's thoughts, and at this girl's diary, so we know from the start that Harpur is right, though he has no good specific reason for his worry. Then she is kidnapped, and while Iles grandstands and withholds information from his county fellows (who, to be fair to him, have done the same in reverse), Harpur does some solo work, and grudgingly cooperates on the sly with his opposite number at the county. The resolution is well worked out, ironic in tone, fitting the book nicely. A solid story, with interesting if not exactly heroic characters. I'll be searching out the rest of these.

The Second in the Harpur and Iles series. An excellent gripping page-turner!!! I have read these in order, and this is THE ONE that really hooks you in. The case itself is a tough one to solve, someone is killing young teenage girls, and not really leaving any decent clues. Meanwhile, the continued insight into Harpur's risque personal life continues to keep the pages rolling by. Highly recommend this one for any fan of Police Procedurals!!!

As a reader of every Bill James paperback I can find, I have yet to read a bad one. He has mastered his characters, his locale and the violent clash between cops and criminals.