Roy Hart was a talented crime writer whose career encompassed eleven novels. The first two were published by Robert Hale for the library market and are little-known. He found a wider readership when he moved to Macmillan with a series featuring a senior cop called Roper. These police stories, published between 1987 and 1993, remind me of the work of his Macmillan stable-mate Jill McGown; they are carefully written, with a satisfactory blend of characterisation and plot. Like McGown's books, Hart's deserve to be better known.
John Cooper has long been a fan of Hart's work, and it was his advocacy that first interested me in this author. When I got the chance to acquire John's Hart collection, including some signed copies and letters, at a modest price, I couldn't resist. I've begun the Roper series at the beginning, and Seascape with Dead Figures (1987) is a well-crafted story that is a good, quick read.
At new year, the body of a man in his seventies called Winterton is found at the bottom of a cliff. Roper concludes early on that he was murdered, and suspicion falls on a group of people who had attended a new year party at Winterton's house. One slight weakness of the story is that there are an awful lot of suspects, and so one or two of them are not developed in depth. But Hart's concise style means that doesn't matter too much.
Winterton, it turns out, was a very nasty piece of work, so plenty of people had reason to wish him ill. Suspicion switches from one individual to another but another body is found at the bottom of the cliffs before Roper is able to identify whodunit. Some of the behaviour of the suspects is a little hard to credit, but Hart was just about able to persuade me to suspend my disbelief. Overall this is an accomplished mystery and I enjoyed reading it.
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