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Alerted by worried neighbours, the police break into a house in the small Yorkshire town of Gunnarshaw. The house is full of gas (this is in 1960 when houses were supplied with town gas – poisonous as well as explosive) and the woman of the house, a middle-aged widow who recently married a much younger man, is lying dead in the upstairs bedroom.
To Inspector Mole and the police surgeon it's obviously a case of suicide; after all, what would a woman with a younger husband do but kill herself? Sergeant Cluff actually knows the people of Gunnershaw and disagrees with his superior, and, without any support, sets out on his own time to prove that Amy Snowden was murdered.
SERGEANT CLUFF STANDS FIRM is part of The British Library Crime Classics series. The series title is a bit of a misnomer, as all the books in the series so far are by authors who were famous in their time, but fell out of popularity and print when they stopped writing. They are all recent enough to be ineligible for scanning by Project Gutenberg, and all have an informative introduction by Martin Edwards. They're all worth reading because they depict the past from within, rather than with hindsight.
Gil North's work was so popular that when he was approached by the BBC about a Sergeant Cluff television series, all the meetings were held in Skipton as North wouldn't go to London (apparently BBC commissioning editors had never ventured so far north before) and North wrote all the episodes in the series.
While Sergeant Cluff is a policeman, this isn't a police procedural; it's a psychological thriller in which justice is meted out by conviction and force of character, not by dogged detective work (though Cluff's ability to make connections does play a part). Cluff has a cat and a dog and no bad habits except for knowing and caring for the people he polices.
The town of Gunnarshaw is effectively and matter of factly portrayed and is closely based on Skipton, where North was living when he wrote the Cluff series. It's not a picture postcard village with maiden aunts cycling to church, but a slightly grimy place where the banks of the canal are crumbling and the canal is full of rubbish, as virtually all canals were in 1960. Most of the dramatic writing is reserved for the moors surrounding the town and there is a great sense of a difference between a safe, closed urban area and the wild moors where there's more than just people with shotguns to be fearful of.
The writing is clean and sparse and surprisingly modern for something written in 1960. There's one thing that rather dates the book, however. Every time a woman appears for the first time, her character is expressed via the size and shape of her breasts (always clothed, as this is before the Sixties started swinging).
The year after this book was published, committing or attempting suicide was decriminalised in the UK. That sort of change in the law doesn't happen suddenly or without public and parliamentary discussion, and it seems unlikely that North was unaware of this when he wrote a fine description of a suicide's funeral – wrong side of the churchyard, unmarked grave, and more spectators than mourners.
SERGEANT CLUFF STANDS FIRM is a well written psychological drama; a short but punchy depiction of an unorthodox investigation of a death which is only seen as suspicious by one man.
§Rik Shepherd has been a computer programmer and a web accessibility consultant, but is currently a carer. He lives in the north West of England and is mildly surprised to have just realised he's been reading crime fiction for 45 years.
Reviewed by Rik Shepherd, November 2016
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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