Jeff,
Re your question below:
"Could you tell me a little bit,about Bill James,i'm not sure
i've ever heard of him."
Bill James is a Welsh writer, who worked for several years as
a reporter in London (the DAILY MAIL, I think). He also
writes as David Craig.
He is best-known for an ultra-hard series of police novels
about a pair of cops, Detective Chief Superintendent Colin
Harpur and his immediate superior, Assistant Chief Constable
for Crime Iles.
Harpur is basically a decent, honest copper who tries to do
the right thing, but he's also seriously flawed, and does a
lot of not particularly admirable things. Iles, bigoted,
perhaps a bit psychopathic, but with a surface gentility and
a well-spoken, educated manner, is far more scary, and Harpur
spends as much of his time reining in his boss as he does
fighting bad guys.
They are contrasted with the Organized Crime community in
their town, and the books are about the series of encounters
and uneasy truces between the flawed defenders and curiously
sympathetic offenders of the law.
The town in which the series is set is unnamed, but some have
assumed that the city is Cardiff because of James's Welsh
background. Further, a TV-movie, HARPUR
& ILES, based on the fourth book in the series,
PROTECTION, was filmed in Cardiff.
James, however, is on record as saying that the town is NOT
Cardiff. Cardiff, he insists, doesn't have the structure of
Organized Crime that other British cities like London,
Manchester, or Glasgow have. He has made an effort to keep
the city fairly nondescript.
Under his "David Craig" pen name, he HAS written another
procedural series that is set specifically in Cardiff.
Hope that helps.
JIM DOHERTY
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