Forgotten Book - Illegal Tender

I felt a genuine sense of regret when I finished reading Dominic Devine's 1970 novel Illegal Tender. Not because of any flaws in the storyline, but because it meant I'd read all thirteen of his novels. They are all stand-alones, which usually means that quality can vary quite a bit, but in fact Devine is very, very good at ringing the changes while making the most of his strengths, which are considerable.

His ability to construct a strong whodunit plot is especially impressive. But he also understood office life, and its tensions, and the secrets hidden within seemingly respectable lives. His fiction gives a pretty good insight into the social mores of middle-class Britain at the time. Most of his stories are set in Scotland, and even those that aren't generally have some Scottish characters or scenes. He was very strong on academic life, which he knew intimately, but he also seems to have had a very close knowledge of local government and how it operates on a day to day basis. The background seems to me to be highly authentic.

This story is set in a fictitious local authority, Kilcrannon, and it's one of a number of crime novels written during the same period which deal with local government corruption. Michael Gilbert's The Crack in the Teacup was another, but Devine explores the topic in greater depth, even though his protagonist, Jennifer Ainslie is, like Gilbert's, a trained lawyer. In some ways, their work was prescient, because not long after those novels appeared, the Poulson scandal began to unfold. 

There haven't been many major crime novels in recent times that I can think of which deal with similar themes, which is surprising, because corruption in local government definuitely hasn't gone away. The municipal hierarchy in Scotland at the time was evidently quite complex, and Devine might have given us a bit more explanation about how it operated, but he is content to tell the story in a pacy way and trust his readers to work things out for themselves. 

Did I manage to deduce the identity of the culprit? In this case, no, I was miles out. Devine was a very crafty crime writer indeed.