Wickham Gore Doesn’t Always Get His Man (Or Woman)

 There’s a bit of a story arc to the seven Wickham Gore books by Lynn Brock (aka Alistair McAllistair or Anthony Wharton), although it didn’t go quite where I thought it was going in the end. By the middle of the series he’s a professional detective with an office and a junior partner, where at the start he’s looking around for a job as he cannot live within his army pension and gets pulled into a mystery after a knife he gave a young woman called ‘Pickles’ as a wedding present is used to stab someone. 

He is, of course, carrying a bit of a flame for Pickles, and if affection can be measured by first nagging him to get a job, then later in the series nagging him about the job he eventually takes up, Pickles is fond of him too.

Not that I can’t see Pickles’ point. Gore is one of those detectives who puts himself in danger repeatedly. During this short series he is bopped over the head, almost electrocuted, shot and gassed in his bed. Apart from that he’s not a bad detective – he can put two and two together (although sometimes I didn’t quite see how a case could be proved, and in book six or seven when it turned out one of his criminals had been acquitted for just that reason I could have shaken Brock’s hand).

A likable detective, competent with flashes of brilliance and moments of stupidity (especially, as I’ve said, where his own safety is concerned), middle-aged (I got the impression his image of himself is older perhaps than others perceive him) and not especially broad or narrow minded for the time, I think.

That said I don’t think the books would have suffered from taking some of the more offensive language out, but since the format I read was the cheap electronic publication for Kindle I suspect they were scanned in and skim read at best. I usually wouldn't complain given the cheapness, but for the sake of future readers I will say the transcription is far from perfect. Not so much that it’s unreadable, but it can be a distraction to find words missing or letters misplaced by numbers when tension is meant to be ramping up or you’re looking for clues. 

Anyway would I recommend this series? Definitely yes. I had no intention of reading them all when I started but I kept downloading the next and gobbling them down. I liked old Gore, and Brock’s lush descriptions of place and the ridiculous plots and occasional weirdnesses, and I wanted to see what happened next.