John Harvey

• Born: December 21, 1938
• Place of Birth: London, England

TYPES OF PLOT: Police procedural; private investigator; hard-boiled; thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Scott Mitchell, 1976-; Charlie Resnick, 1989-2013; Frank Elder, 2004-2018

Contribution

A prolific writer since the mid-1970s, John Harvey has written—in his own name and under a number of pseudonyms—in a wide variety of subgenres, including motorcycle adventure stories, Westerns, war stories, private eye novels, police procedurals, amateur sleuth novels, and thrillers. In addition to novels, he has written poetry, short stories, books for juveniles, and novelizations of films and television shows. He also has written for television and radio. Probably the best known of Harvey’s many creations is Charlie Resnick, the competent, unambitious detective inspector who is the central character in a series of well-regarded police procedurals and a number of short stories.

Harvey has received considerable commercial and critical success during his lengthy career. His first Resnick series novel, Lonely Hearts (1989), was shortlisted for the Gold Dagger Award by the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) and was named one of the one hundred most notable crime novels of the twentieth century by the Times of London, and his adaptation of the novel for television earned a bronze medal for best screenplay at the 1992 New York Festival. Often nominated for other CWA awards, Harvey has won the Sherlock Award for the best British detective novel for Last Rites (1998), the Sony Radio Drama Silver Award for his adaptation of ’s The End of the Affair (1999), and the Grand Prix du Roman Noir for Cold Light (1994). Harvey’s first entry in a crime series featuring retired detective Frank Elder, Flesh and Blood (2004), won the CWA’s Silver Dagger Award for fiction and the American Barry Award as best British crime novel of the year. In 2007, Harvey won the Prix du Polar Européen for Ash and Bone (2005), the second novel in the Frank Elder series. The same year, he was honored with the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for sustained excellence in crime writing.

The fourteen-book Charlie Resnick series continued with Cold in Hand (2008) and concluded with Darkness, Darkness (2013). The four-book Frank Elder series continued with Darkness and Light (2006) and ended with Body and Soul (2018). In addition to his series, Harvey wrote several stand-alone novels, novellas, and short stories, including Gone to Ground (2007), Nick's Blues (2008), Far Cry (2009), A Darker Shade of Blue (2010), and Good Bait (2012).

Biography

John Barton Harvey was born December 21, 1938, in London and spent much of his childhood in Nottingham. He attended Goldsmith’s College at the University of London, where he earned a teaching certificate in 1963. He married and fathered twins Tom and Leanne before he was divorced in the mid-1970s. Between 1963 and 1974, Harvey taught English and drama at a succession of secondary schools in London, Derbyshire, Andover, Hampshire, and Hertfordshire. From 1970 to 1974, he also studied at Hatfield Polytechnic, earning a bachelor’s degree in English.

From the early 1970s onward, Harvey contributed short stories to various periodicals and, in 1975, wrote his first novels—Avenging Angel and Angel Alone—a pair of violent motorcycle epics under the pseudonym Thom Ryder. This work apparently unlocked the floodgates of his creativity, and over the next decade, Harvey poured out a veritable torrent of novels, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms, including dozens of Westerns in numerous series, such as the Hawk, Peacemaker, and Gringos series. Under his own name, Harvey also produced a hard-boiled private eye series featuring Scott Mitchell (beginning with Amphetamines and Pearls, 1976), wrote novelizations of films and television shows, and turned out books for juveniles (such as What About It, Sharon? 1979), television scripts, and occasional poetry chapbooks (Provence, 1978).

For more than twenty years (1977-1999), Harvey was editor and publisher of Nottingham’s Slow Dancer Press, supporting the work of underpublished writers, and he edited Slow Dancer magazine from 1977 to 1993. In the meantime, he returned to education, earning a master’s degree with a specialty in American studies in 1979 at the University of Nottingham, where he served as a part-time instructor in film and literature from 1979 to 1986.

Since 1989, when Lonely Hearts, the first in his acclaimed Charlie Resnick series of police procedurals was published, Harvey has achieved considerable recognition under his own name as a writer of fiction. He is also renowned as a film and book reviewer for the Nottingham News, Trader, and Time Out; as a poet (with such volumes as Ghosts of a Chance and Territory, both 1992); as a teacher-tutor with the Arvon Foundation and with the Squaw Valley Community of Writers’ Fiction Workshop (1995); and as a television and radio scriptwriter. His award-winning Frank Elder crime novels (Flesh and Blood, Ash and Bone, and Darkness and Light, 2006) have stirred interest among a new generation of readers for his earlier work.

Harvey became a father again in 1998, with the birth of a daughter, Molly Ernestine Bolling, to his partner Sarah. After living in London and in Cornwall—where his Frank Elder novels are set—Harvey and his family moved back to Nottingham in 2004.

Analysis

John Harvey learned the writing craft well while writing dozens of novels, primarily Westerns, between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. His acquired skills have been particularly evident since 1989 when he published Lonely Hearts, the initial entry in the Charlie Resnick series of police procedurals. It is to Harvey’s credit that he makes it seem easy to bring together various elements of storytelling—characterization, dialogue, setting, voice, plotting, and pacing—to create a coherent whole. He produces novels whose overall effect is synergistic: works that result in much greater effect than the sum of their parts. Harvey’s unflinchingly hard-boiled, naturalistic Resnick novels are not so much read as they are experienced; they are masterful examples of what Samuel Coleridge meant when he wrote of the writers’ goal to create a “willing suspension of disbelief.” Harvey accomplishes this effect through stylistically simple, straightforward, reportorial writing that does not clamor for attention.

Resnick and the other characters who stalk the pages of Harvey’s novels are, first and foremost, authentic and believable. Each of the players has unique qualities: small quirks, flaws, habits, interests, prejudices, and beliefs that bring them to life as individuals. They speak as real people do—in nonsequiturs, with profanity, in darkly humorous asides and insults, in lies and half-truths designed to save face or hide exposure—stuttering and fumbling in their attempts to express the inexpressible. Charlie Resnick, in particular, is a brilliant creation, a police officer who feels sympathy and compassion for both those who abide by the law and those who break it because he knows that life is hard and filled with temptations to which anyone can succumb and that existence does not consist merely of black-and-white absolutes but rather a succession of grays.

Told in the third person from various viewpoints, central of which is Resnick’s, the plots are almost mundane because they deal with ordinary—though frequently horrific—crimes. These are often the result of dysfunctional families in which abused children grow up to become abusers. Other interrelated themes concern the huge gap between the haves and the have-nots, or the animosity among natives and aliens in British society. Whatever their root causes, conflicts suddenly and inevitably spin out of control with violent consequences for perpetrator and victim alike. Resnick’s modern, technologically advanced world is one of isolation, despair, uncertainty, and confusion, which the author has keenly observed and deftly drawn.

The language of Harvey’s novels is deceptively simple, with few similes, metaphors, or other literary devices cluttering a narrative propelled by a common, everyday vocabulary. Dialogue, reproducing the speech patterns and regional inflections of different classes of citizens, carries the heaviest burden, advancing plot, shading character, and establishing atmosphere. Suspense comes through the presentation of a variety of disparate perspectives that slowly coalesce, as characters are placed in jeopardy, suspects are eliminated, motives come to light, and clues are revealed. Harvey’s Resnick novels, which routinely receive stellar reviews, have been called, with good reason, a series that transcends genre.

Easy Meat

The eighth novel in the Resnick series, Easy Meat (1996), centers on the activities of the Snape family, a group of dysfunctional people. Matriarch Norma Snape is the slovenly mother of three children—Nicky, Sheena, and Shane—over whom she has little control. Sixteen-year-old Sheena hangs out with a pack of wild, violent, drugged-out girls, and it will be only a matter of time until she gets into serious trouble. Shane, eighteen, is a lazy lout who spends most of his days watching television or palling around with a bunch of racists who delight in mischief, particularly in beating up Irishmen and homosexuals. Fifteen-year-old Nicky specializes in burglary—during the course of a break-in, he beats an older couple senseless, a crime that draws the attention of detective inspector Charlie Resnick and his crew. Charlie is attracted to Hannah Campbell, one of Nicky’s teachers, and they become lovers.

Forensic evidence uncovered by those under Resnick’s command leads to the capture of Nicky, and the juvenile is placed in detention while awaiting trial, where he promptly dies by hanging, apparently a suicide. Bill Alston, a police officer nearing retirement, is assigned to lead the investigation into Nicky’s death and shortly afterward is beaten to death while walking his dogs.

A fascinating study of urban violence, with the underlying theme of the debate regarding nature-versus-nurture theories of human behavior, Easy Meat presents a complex plot revolving around mindless prejudice, while providing glimpses at British police procedures and office politics that hamper investigations. Characters are exceedingly well drawn and speak in natural, slangy, profane voices that make them come alive. The lean, atmospheric narration, in which not a word is wasted, evokes a unique setting. Harvey nonjudgmentally explores the tangled relationships among the assorted cast in the course of demonstrating that there is a fine line between good and the evil in society.

In a True Light

In the nonseries novel In a True Light (2001), minor artist Sloane is sixty years old and just released from a British prison following a two-year sentence for forging paintings at the instigation of London gallery owner Robert Parsons. Picking up the pieces of his life, Sloane returns to the studio he set up before his incarceration, where he finds a letter from a long-ago lover, Jane Graham, a well-known abstract painter living in Italy. She has leukemia and wants to see Sloane before she dies. Sloane travels to Italy, where Jane informs him that their liaison in New York City in the late 1950s resulted in the birth of a daughter, Connie. On her deathbed, Jane extracts a promise from Sloane that he will attempt to find Connie, now in her early forties and residing somewhere in New York.

Sloane travels to the United States and, playing detective, follows Connie’s trail. He manages to track her down and discovers that his daughter, long dependent on drugs and alcohol, has become a lounge singer. She is in the clutches of her manager-lover, Vincent Delaney, a money launderer with ties to the mob. Delaney has a history of violence toward women and is under surreptitious observation by New York detectives Catherine Vargas and John Cherry as a suspect in the murder of nightclub singer Diane Stewart. It is up to Sloane, working in reluctant concert with the police, to rescue Connie and put an end to Delaney’s vicious ways.

A study of various characters in conflict with one another and with themselves, In a True Light contains the hallmarks of Harvey’s other crime fiction. Characters are believable, dialogue rings true, and settings—which range from London to rural Italy and from Phoenix, Arizona, to New York City—are economically described. Though a crime story, the novel is not quite as dark or as introspective as Harvey’s series work. As in much of the author’s fiction, a musical thread runs through the narration, reflecting Harvey’s longstanding interest in jazz.

Flesh and Blood

The first in a trilogy, Flesh and Blood features retired detective inspector Frank Elder, a tall, thin man in his fifties who lives by himself in a cottage in Cornwall, where he is haunted by dreams of former cases. He becomes involved on a freelance consultant basis in the long-ago disappearance of Susan Blacklock, occasioned by the release from prison of Shane Donald after serving thirteen years. Donald, who in league with the still-incarcerated Alan McKeirnan, raped, tortured, and killed a teenage girl, may have been involved with several other girls who vanished. A suspenseful, semiprofessional procedural tale offering all the innate qualities of the author’s earlier series, Flesh and Blood includes a Charlie Resnick cameo.

Principal Series Characters:

• Scott Mitchell is England’s toughest—and best—private eye. At his core, he is kindhearted, but he usually does not have the opportunity to show his softer side as he becomes swept up in a series of ultraviolent cases.
• Charlie Resnick is a detective inspector with the Nottingham Criminal Investigative Division in the East Midlands of England. A large, bulky, rumpled man of Polish heritage in his forties, he has been a police officer since the mid-1970s. An avid jazz fan, he lives in a large house with four cats named after musicians (Dizzy, Miles, Pepper, and Bud). A compassionate man, Resnick broods over past cases, particularly those in which someone died. Formerly married to an unfaithful wife, Elaine, he has relationships with several women before taking up with high school teacher Hannah Campbell.
• Hannah Campbell, an attractive high school English teacher in her mid-thirties, has blond hair with red highlights. She began an affair with Resnick during the course of an investigation involving one of her students. Their relationship is a loving one, though not always smooth because several of her past relationships have colored her attitude toward men. In addition, she is not a cat lover.
• Frank Elder, in his early fifties, has been a police officer since he was twenty. He worked his way up the ladder from uniformed officer in Leeds and Huddersfield to detective in Lincolnshire, and eventually to detective inspector in West London and in the Nottinghamshire Major Crime Unit. Discouraged by law enforcement’s failure to make inroads against rampant crime, he retired on a pension. Elder, however, continues to investigate cases informally, sometimes acting as a consultant to the police. Separated from his wife, Joanne, because of her infidelity, he has a teenage daughter, Katherine, called Kate.

Bibliography

"Awards." John Harvey, 2021, mellotone.co.uk/awards. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Drew, Bernard A., et al., editors. Western Series and Sequels: A Reference Guide. New York: Garland, 1986.

Sadler, Geoff. Twentieth-Century Western Writers. Chicago: St. James Press, 1991.

Stasio, Marilyn. “Crime.” Review of Cutting Edge, by John Harvey. The New York Times Book Review, 7 July 1991, p. 19.

Stasio, Marilyn. “Crime.” Review of Flesh and Blood, by John Harvey. The New York Times Book Review, 25 July 2004, p. 19.