Books Monthly Watching the Detectives

Anyone who's fighting to keep Britain's libraries open - it's unthinkable that anyone could even contemplate this - there is a Facebook page, just search for "save our libraries" and the UK page will show up...

I was amazed to find, when researching Hunter, that the Wikipedia reference to him concentrates on the BBC TV series and not the books. He was a prolific author, turning out a Gently novel a year, beginning in 1955. It is also a matter of some mystery to me why the BBC chose to relocate GENTLY from Norfolk to Northumberland - the only reason I can think of is that Martin Shaw might not have been able to master a Norfolk accent - although having said that, and enjoyable as the series are, his mastery of accents isn't that good - his portrayal of Gently might just as well be an extension of his portrayal of Judge John Deed, only in the other side of the British Justice system. Constable have so far republished six of the novels - a further three are out this November, and all are worthy detective fiction mysteries. There's no sign of Bacchus in the books (so far, at any rate) and Gently is very much a one-man band, with plodding constables and sergeants, together with local policemen running around making rather a mess of things until Gently turns up on secondment from Scotland Yard to sort things out. I wonder if Hunter was aware of the national perception of Norfolk people being a little slow and in some cases even obstructive, because, being a Norfolk man himself, you would think he might have found one or two of the local policemen in his novels to be rather more competent. They are almost always portrayed as dim, bumbling and often downright stupid, and Gently is almost always in conflict with them. I don't hale from Norfolk, I'm a Gloucestershire lad, and I have no idea what the perception of Gloucestershire people is. I know about the Forest of Dean folk, of course, but there is far more to Gloucestershire than that. I wouldn't mind betting that we are perceived as similar to Norfolk folk, and that if Gently had been set there, the results would have been much to same - dim, plodding plods in Cotswold villages, with a Yard man coming along to take charge and show them all up. I love the Gently books - it's always a treat for me to read about police procedurals before mobile phones and protective clothing for scenes of crime. I was brought up on Inspector West and Sir Henry Merrivale - Gently combines the two in terrific style, and the atmosphere is pure Norfolk, which is where I live now, of course. A great series of books - the TV series is enjoyable too, but it's really not George Gently at all, it's Martin Shaw Investigates. It's as far divorced from Gently as it could possibly be, and the BBC are utter cowards for going down that particular route, in my opinion. I'm happy to watch further episodes, but they should cease calling them George Gently forthwith. It's a kind of sacrilege. I cannot think of any other TV detective series that is so far removed from the original novels.

Alan Hunter (25 June 1922 - 26 February 2005) was an English author of crime fiction. All of his 46 novels feature Inspector George Gently and are mainly set in East Anglia.

Initially a farmer, he became an antiquarian bookseller before writing his first novel. Inspector George Gently (simply called George Gently for the pilot and first series) is a British television series produced by Company Pictures for BBC One, set in the 1960s and based on the Inspector Gently novels by Alan Hunter and featuring Martin Shaw as the eponymous inspector, Lee Ingleby as Detective Sergeant John Bacchus and Simon Hubbard as PC Taylor at the police station front desk. It moved the setting of the stories to Northumberlandand County Durham from the Norfolk portrayed in the books. In January 2010 it was announced that the BBC had secured funding from the North East Content Fund to produce further episodes of the detective drama, with filming for series 4 taking place during early to mid 2011. Most of Hunter's novels were set in his native East Anglia and were inspired by local life and lore. In Gently Instrumental (1977), for example, the Chief Inspector is called to a music festival, not a thousand miles away from Aldeburgh, where the town's second-best composer is about to achieve fame with a clarinet quintet - that is, until the clarinettist, the composer's petulant boyfriend, is found murdered after flouncing out of a rehearsal. In Gently Where the Birds Are (1976), a body is found in a wood and the chief suspect is the warden of a local bird sanctuary. His hero's craftily chosen surname gave Hunter scope for a series of punning titles including Gently Down the Stream (1957), Gently Floating (1963) and even Landed Gently (1957). Hunter admired the writer Georges Simenon, and the character of Gently was sometimes likened to that of Inspector Maigret. Like the French detective, Gently solves his cases through a combination of reason, deduction and a world-weary understanding of his fellow man. But in fact, the character bore uncanny similarities to the author himself, who also smoked a pipe and had the same sort of pithy turn of phrase. Alan Hunter was born on June 25 1922 in the Broads village of Hoveton St John on the river Bure, near Norwich. In his teens he spent his spare time exploring the Broads in a sailing dinghy, and writing poetry and short stories, as well as natural history notes in the local Evening News. He left Wroxham School aged 14 to work on his father's poultry farm and also took a correspondence course in advertising. During the war he served as an aircraft technician in the RAF and published a collection of poetry, The Norwich Poems (1944). In 1946 he was appointed manager of the antiquarian books department of Charles Cubitt, booksellers, in Norwich, before setting up his own bookshop in the town's Maddermarket in 1950.His first detective novel, Gently Does It, was published in 1955, and he continued to turn them out at an average rate of more than one a year. His last novel, his 48th, Over Here (one of a handful without the word Gently in the title), was published in 1998. Hunter lived all his life in Norfolk, latterly in the village of Brundall. A keen local historian and amateur naturalist, he enjoyed sailing and having a pint with friends in the local pub. He disliked organised religion, describing himself, when asked, as a Zen Buddhist. He married, in 1944, Adelaide Cooper, who survives him with their daughter.

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