Easy Streets Book

The cover of this book calls it "A Harpur & Iles Mystery", which must be one of the most remarkable pieces of copywriting idiocy ever to appear. It is, for a start, not a mystery.

What is this book exactly? It's a crime novel, and it has cops in it called Harpur and Iles. But it's not in any real sense a mimetic novel. Instead, it's a sort of extraordinarily mannered semi-comedy of manners, semi-Jacobean tragedy. In an unnamed British city, the controllers of the drug trade are trying to adapt to the fact that the street price of their merchandise is plummeting dues to the easing of governmental attitudes toward dope. So they jostle for supremacy in an attempt to restructure the marketplace, killing each other in the process. And the cops seem complicit in all this. And, toward the end of the book, I didn't care in the slightest what happened so long as I got to page 191 and could read something else instead.

Bill James is a much-loved writer -- there are quotes all over the cover from hifalutin critics -- but not one for me. I have a feeling that, many years ago, I was deceived by the strapline into reading a different "Harpur & Iles Mystery" and spent much of the relevant time fighting a potent urge to throw it at the wall. A I imply, different readers may well have a completely different take on this book than I did.