Sloan and Crosby
Encyclopedia
Book series
A book series is a sequence of books having certain characteristics in common that are formally identified together as a group. Book series can be organized in different ways, such as written by the same author, or marketed as a group by their publisher....
of 20 crime
Crime fiction
Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
s by the English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
author Catherine Aird
Catherine Aird
Catherine Aird is the pseudonym of novelist Kinn Hamilton McIntosh. She is the author of more than twenty crime fiction novels and several collections of short stories...
. The first The Religious Body (ISBN 0745157092) appeared in 1966 and the last Past Tense (ISBN 9870749007645) in 2010.
"The Sloan & Crosby series is not to be missed by lovers of a good mystery. The mysteries have a wonderful comic touch, intricate plotting and literate charm."
Christopher Dennis Sloan, known to his colleagues as "Seedy", is a long suffering Detective Inspector. Happily married, he grows roses in his (limited) spare time. In each novel he is helped by the hapless Detective Constable William Crosby, a fast-driving but slow-thinking young man avoided by his colleagues. Only Sloan's wife Margaret has ever been known to say a good word about him. In each novel Sloan is put under pressure by his immediate superior, the choleric Superintendent Leeyes. The laboured conversations between the two men summarise the plot at regular intervals. The only other three characters who appear regularly are: Dr Dabbe, the lugubrious pathologist; Dyson, the caption-loving police photographer; and traffic division head Inspector "Happy" Harpe, so named because he claims he has never had anything to smile about.
The books, set in a county easily identifiable as Kent, often turn on ecclesiastical matters and show Aird's deep knowledge of canon law.