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Wasted Years
John Harvey
Viking hardback, 288 pages, £14.99
Published April 1993
ISBN 0670848891
Arrow paperback, 344 pages, £5.99
Published August 1994
ISBN 0749318422
Review by Gerald Houghton (1993)

If the detectives in British crime fiction have made a virtue of their melancholia, Charlie Resnick wears his as a veritable badge. He has wandered through the pages of four previous novels in a perpetual state of jazz-fuelled despair, deepened rather than lightened should an unattached woman ever crossed his path. These books are short on laughs.

Wasted Years, as before, is set almost exclusively in Nottingham, and even though the city is never actually mentioned by name, it haunts the pages just as surely as any fantasy creation. An armed gang are stalking its streets and their reported exploits play unwitting parent to Darren, an ex borstal boy with ill-considered dreams of a life of violent crime himself, dragging the diminutive, reluctant Keith in his wake. The big boys, however, awake memories of a decade previous, where James Prior led an equally ruthless band before being run to ground by Resnick and his colleagues. And as luck would have it, Prior is now up for parole and fears abound for the safety of the wife who put him inside.

Wasted Years is, therefore, very much of its type – the detailing and development of the investigating team in particular – and yet far more ambitious than its predecessors. A key change is a brief prologue from 1969 and, more tellingly, a substantial flashback in the book’s central section to events in 1981, as the police track Prior’s gang and Resnick’s marriage begins to fail. This material provides not only a solid backbone to the unfolding plot; the back story helps to raise Resnick himself above the liberal lawman and collection of mannerisms he has often been reduced to in the other books – the cats named for jazz greats, the exotic sandwiches, etc. This is both refreshing and welcome to veterans of his cases and will serve him well as he begins to develop (especially with the help of TV) into a strong series character.

In the past, for all that he has built solid, well-reasoned foundations for the books, John Harvey has suffered a tendency to rush at finales like the proverbial bull in a china shop, often overloading with cheap whodunits or farcical twists of plot (Cutting Edge comes to mind). Here though he handles the disparate elements with more assurance than ever before, taking lessons from the better US crime writing in the development of different plot strands and his allowing characterisation to dominate a mood and atmosphere over any pretence towards a revelatory climax, slightly recalling the best of the Resnick novels, Rough Treatment.

Which is not to say that Wasted Years is perfect – one particular discovery late on does tend to hinge on a rather convenient coincidence rather than the procedural policing that leads to it, and the resolution, despite a neat double-take on expectations, tends to feel a little rushed given all that precedes. Those slight caveats aside however, Wasted Years is by some distance Harvey’s most complete work to date, and substantially satisfying in its own right.