Modern village murder

Press, 2 May 1981, Page 17

Modern village murder

The Chief Inspector’s Daughter. By Sheila Radley. Constable, 1981. 208 pp. $19.25. Alison Quantrill, ingenue, returns from London to her sleepy Suffolkhome after a harrowing love-affair. Chance (without which detective fiction. would be lost) lands her a job as secretary’to successful, glamorous, romantic novelist Jasmine Woods (who sounds like one of her own heroines). Alison’s fraught young existence is further burdened by. finding her employer viciously and sadistically murdered. Depending on your viewpoint, she breaks down or cracks up, but her father, Chief Inspector Quantrill, is on the case. C.I. Quantrill is a middle-class, plodding copper, inhibited and culturally unsophisticated, but reliably and honestly doing his upright best. Detective Sergeant Martin Tait is Quantrill’s well-educated, culturally sophisticated foil, who one day will be chief constable.

In spite of its rather hackneyed hero, “The Chief Inspector’s Daughter” is a most pleasant book. It is instantly in the, tradition of the English Detective Story: small country house, a miscellany of unusual characters, and a victim with; a suitable mixture of friends and enemies. Clues and false trails are laid, followed, and toes are stubbed on the brick walls at their ends. Eventually, with the help of Alison’s intuition, Tait’s flair, and Quantrill’s thoroughness, the villain is unmasked. '• ■. The charm of this book is that although it is so delightfully traditional and sleepy, Sheila Radley has brought the tradition up 1 to date. There are drugs, drop-outs, a* commune, women’s lib, and even the ioccasional mention of lesbianism. All this { will not please the purist, but after all we j must move with the times, even iri this -, final bastion of mannered fiction. — Ken Strongman.