Cold Light - Softcover

John Harvey is a novelist and critic. He has taught for the University of Cambridge English Faculty since 1974 and in 2000 became University Reader in Literature and Visual Culture. He is a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Reviewers are running out of superlatives to describe Harvey's Charlie Resnick novels, and Harvey isn't helping us at all by turning out one book a year, each as good as or better than its predecessors. This sixth in the series finds Resnick and his fellow coppers in the industrial English city of Nottingham harried as usual, what with the customary run of Christmastime crimes. Matters take a decided turn for the worse, though, when a Social Services caseworker goes missing; messages from the kidnapper follow, indicating similarity to a previous case and suggesting that the perpetrator is very sick indeed. What separates a Resnick novel from other procedurals isn't the facts of the cases at hand; it's the nuanced portrait of how these cases affect the individual lives of police, criminals, and victims alike. As readers, we find ourselves both overwhelmed at the omnipresence of pain in Resnick's world and moved by the ways people deal with it: the reliance on irony; the savoring of small pleasures, whether it's a well-made sandwich or a nicely constructed tenor sax solo; and, most of all, the shared pleasure of hard work done well. This is no sentimentalized view, however; pain cripples, both emotionally and physically, and Resnick feels more than his share. It's time to stop calling Harvey one of our best crime writers and acknowledge that he is one of our best fiction writers, period. No one since Dickens has written about the British working class with greater insight or feeling. Bill Ott