The Interrogators

There is a bookcase in an apartment in Mallorca. It's full of wrinkle-spined paperbacks of a certain age that get more crispy and soaked with salt and suncream year after year. It's got books in languages that I can't really read. It's got Italian yellow fiction, the original ones with the eponymous yellow spines. It got some classics, some modern classics. Every year though, I try and pull something off there that is in English and is unapologetically genre.

Last year, I read an original 80s paperback edition of Fletch and The Man Who, and this year I read The Interrogators. It was first published in ‘65 and the Pan Books copy I had can't have been much younger than that.

Get your bingo cards ready. In a fictional town in Northern England, a jaded detective (name of Savage) takes on one last case. A girl is abducted, sexually abused, and murdered by a depraved killer who is still on the loose. Savage is assigned a naive rookie as a partner, and together they try and crack the case. If it weren't for these politicians and higher-ups, they might have a chance.

It couldn't be more rote, and I'm not even here to claim that this is more than it says on the tin because it's not. But it was an unputdownable, workmanlike detective fiction that saw me through a couple of afternoons by the sea. It was my annual reminder that clichés exist for a reason and that I need to get over myself once in a while.