Frank Hastings is a fictional detective

Detective

A detective is an investigator, either a member of a police agency or a private person. The latter may be known as private investigators or "private eyes"...

 in the Homicide

Homicide

Homicide refers to the act of a human killing another human. Murder, for example, is a type of homicide. It can also describe a person who has committed such an act, though this use is rare in modern English...

 Detail of the San Francisco Police Department

San Francisco Police Department

The San Francisco Police Department, also known as the SFPD and San Francisco Department Of Police, is the police department of the City and County of San Francisco, California...

, who is the main character in a police procedural

Police procedural

The police procedural is a subgenre of detective fiction which attempts to convincingly depict the activities of a police force as they investigate crimes. While traditional detective novels usually concentrate on a single crime, police procedurals frequently depict investigations into several...

 series by Collin Wilcox (1924-1996).

Hastings is a divorced man who came to the law enforcement profession comparatively late in life. Like his creator, he was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan

Detroit, Michigan

Detroit is the major city among the primary cultural, financial, and transportation centers in the Metro Detroit area, a region of 5.2 million people. As the seat of Wayne County, the city of Detroit is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and serves as a major port on the Detroit River...

. After graduating from college, he was briefly a professional football

American football

American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...

 player in the Detroit Lions

Detroit Lions

The Detroit Lions are a professional American football team based in Detroit, Michigan. They are members of the North Division of the National Football Conference in the National Football League , and play their home games at Ford Field in Downtown Detroit.Originally based in Portsmouth, Ohio and...

. After his marriage went sour, he moved west and eventually joined the SFPD. He rose quickly in the department and is now the junior lieutenant

Lieutenant

A lieutenant is a junior commissioned officer in many nations' armed forces. Typically, the rank of lieutenant in naval usage, while still a junior officer rank, is senior to the army rank...

 in Homicide, subordinate to his close friend, Lieutenant Pete Friedman.

Most of the Hastings novels are first person narratives

First-person narrative

First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...

 told by Hastings himself, but some later books in the series are told in the third person.

One of the entries in the series, Twospot, was a collaboration between Wilcox and Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini is an American writer of detective fiction. He is also an active anthologist, having compiled more than 100 collections, most of which focus on mystery, western, and science fiction short stories....

. It teamed Hastings with Pronzini's popular series character, a middle-aged San Francisco private investigator referred to by fans as the Nameless Detective

Nameless Detective

Nameless Detective is the protagonist in a long-running mystery series by Bill Pronzini set in the San Francisco area. The first novel, The Snatch, was published in 1971...

. Hastings and "Nameless" alternate as narrators of the novel.

The Hastings series was widely praised in publications like The Armchair Detective

Armchair detective

Armchair detective is a term used for a fictional investigator who does not personally visit a crime scene or interview witnesses; instead, he or she either reads the story of the crime in a newspaper, or has it recounted to him by another person. As the armchair detective never sees any of the...

for their convincing characters, strong plots, and vivid portrayal of San Francisco.

The Frank Hastings titles include:

• The Lonely Hunter (1969)
• The Disappearance (1970)
• Dead Aim (1971)
• Hiding Place (1973)
• Long Way Down (1974)
• Aftershock (1975)
• Doctor, Lawyer (1977)
• Twospot (1978) with Bill Pronzini
• The Watcher (1978)
• Power Plays (1979)
• Mankiller (1980)
• Stalking Horse (1982)
• Victims (1984)
• Night Games (1986)
• The Pariah (1988)
• Death Before Dying (1990)
• Hire a Hangman (1991)
• Dead Center (1992)
• Switchback (1993)
• Calculated Risk (1995)