Confirmation

OFFICER: Detective Inspector Charles Resnick

FORCE: Nottingham CID

TIME: 1996

CASES: ‘Lonely Hearts’ (1989), ‘Rough Treatment’ (1990), ‘Wasted years’ (1993), ‘Cold Light’ (1994), ‘Living Proof’ (1995) etc.

PROFILE: Charlie Resnick has been described as the misfit copper with a curious, passive charm. A man with a middle-aged paunch due to unhealthy food, bags under his eyes from too little sleep, he operates in the gritty and down-at-heel areas of Nottingham which are said to have among the highest number of cases of violent crime and murder per head in England: a fair proportion of which fall into Resnick’s lap. Several of his cases have involved him crucially with women-a fact which frequently causes him to dwell on the state of his own lovelife. When not at work, Charlie fills in time on his own drinking and listening to jazz. With his Polish roots, quartet of cats named after jazz legends, and general feeling of disillusionment with police politics, Resnick is a multidimensional policeman who throws himself into an investigation as much to escape his loneliness as to solve the crime. In America, he has been greeted by reviewers as ‘one of the most fully realised characters in modern crime fiction’, while The Times recently said that he has now become established as the latest addition to ‘that select band of cold but cultured English inspectors like Morse and Dalgliesh’.

CREATOR: John Harvey (b. 1948) started writing and editing while lie was at school and later in college. For some years he worked as a teacher, at the same time continuing to write a whole batch of pseudonymous paperback novels. In 1976 he created his first private eye, Londoner Scott Mitchell, in ‘Amphetamines and Pearls’, and followed this with three more titles which, he says, were heavily influenced by the works of Raymond Chandler. It was in 1989 that he found his own voice with the first Resnick novel, ‘Lonely Hearts’, and added a new figure to the pantheon of memorable contemporary police detectives. John has also written scripts for television, including Central TV’s series, ‘Hard Cases’, and was closely involved in the making of the BBC TV version of ‘Resnick’, starring Tom Wilkinson. The story ‘Confirmation’ is a new case for the lonely DI that John wrote especially for this collection.