It’s always good to throw in some classic crime into a club year – though by the 1960s, we are well past the Golden Age. But thankfully there was still an option from my teetering piles of unread British Library Crime Classics: The Methods of Sergeant Cluff by Gil North.
Seven years ago, I read the first in the series, and had very mixed feelings. I liked Sergeant Cluff, but the book was so misogynistic that it was hard to get through. The number of times that every woman’s breasts were described was really quite something. I ended with ‘I’d definitely read another Sergeant Cluff novel, because I liked him – but I hope that the author has grown up a bit in the interim.’
And, has he?
Well, I think so. The victim is, again, a young woman who has been murdered – chemist assistant Jane Trundle is discovered dead in the street – and there are plenty of people (including her own parents) around to mutter that she was no better than she ought to be. But it doesn’t seem to permeate through the narrative as much as it did in the previous book. And breasts are only mentioned a normal amount! Cluff, indeed, stands up for her.
“I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes,” the man said. “She asked for it.”
“You’d see her often.”
“Wasn’t she worth looking at?” The man paused. “She made the most of it.”
“She’d nothing else.”
Suspicion immediately lands on her boyfriend. Sergeant Cluff sets about investigating – though the official investigation is being done by a different police officer. Cluff’s involvement is not particularly welcomed, but he has a unique set of skills and attributes that make him persist: he refuses to jump to conclusions, he is stolidly humane, and he is also a local of Gunnarshaw. That gives him particular access to people who might not speak to an outsider, but it also means he can’t be fooled by the veneer of respectability that everyone in the community does their best to retain. And, at the same time, he sees honesty where others might not. I enjoyed how North spelled out the continuing internal conflict between Cluff the professional and Cluff the local:
The course he has to take nagged at him. He knew what he had to do and he had no clear idea of when he was going to do it, or whether he was going to do it at all. He was two men, the Sergeant of Police and Cluff. He feared that what the Sergeant might discover would prove mistaken the innocence in which Cluff believed, with nothing to support belief except Cluff’s identity with Gunnarshaw. The unreasoning emotions of Cluff warred with the detachment the Sergeant was obliged to maintain, the impersonality of the Sergeant with Cluff’s understanding and compassion for people like himself.
The strength of the book remains the character of Cluff, and his excellent dog, rather than the plot itself. But there was another element that I found interesting, that I don’t particularly remember being in the previous one – North’s use of dialogue. So often, throughout the novel, characters are talking slightly at cross purposes – or trying to achieve different things in the exchange. It meant that the conversations are always slightly disorienting, but in a way I found quite effective. It certainly felt realistic and appropriately unsettling, so the reader couldn’t quite relax. It’s Cluff’s way of keeping everyone on their toes, perhaps. I didn’t note down any examples, though I suppose the dialogue in the first quote does demonstrate it a little. It’s hard to exactly put my finger on how it’s done, but it worked well.
The Methods of Sergeant Cluff is pretty flimsy, plotwise, but that’s true of so many classic crime novels. It really rests on Cluff, and on those terms I’d call it a success – certainly much more satisfying than the first in the series.
