Prolific writer John Harvey has freed his faithful protagonist Charlie Resnick from the confines of his own stereotype, remerging as Frank Elder in Harvey's latest works.

Harvey has an impressively large bibliography in a wide range of genres. Much of his early work is in the American Wild West genre, published under a variety of pseudonyms. Harvey also dabbled in poetry as well as teaching drama and literature.

Finally, Harvey found his niche with a successful series of crime novels featuring Charlie Resnick.

Harvey’s wide experience as a writer culminated in works featuring a tight style where every word earned its placed on the page.

Harvey's Style

Stephen King, in his book On Writing, included a chapter “Adverbs Are Not Your Friend” where King advocates careful use of language with particular attention to strong verbs. If the verbs do not stand by themselves and need constant propping up by adverbs then they are the wrong verbs.

This approach exemplifies Harvey’s style where description minimal but making it more powerful.

Hardboiled Detective Style Origins

Harvey follows in the footsteps of the pioneers of American hardboiled detective fiction such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The solution of the crime or mystery is there as a thread around which Harvey tells the real story of the lives of his police officers and the seamier side of Nottingham.

This is much in Hammett’s American style as Raymond Chandler observed in his essay The Simple Art of Murder.

“Hammett did not write detective stories at all, merely hardboiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini.”

Resnick Runs Out Of Puff

After ten novels Charlie Resnick seemed to be getting tired. Some of the quirkiness lost its freshness and became too restricting. Domestically Resnick’s main relationship is with his cats. Resnick’s tastes in food, and his obsession with jazz, left Harvey with little room for story development.

Apart from Resnick, the novels feature a strong cast of supporting characters among fellow police officers. This provides a number of sub plots in each story enabling Harvey to control the flow of action and give a range of views on the main narrative.

However, many of these stories became played out over the course of the series, and occasional introduction of new characters threatened to degrade any more novels into a version of a television soap opera.

Charlie Resnick Emerges as Frank Elder

Harvey made the wise move to abandon Charlie Resnick and start over with a new protagonist, Frank Elder, in Flesh and Blood and Ash and Bone

Not surprisingly though, if you scratch Frank Elder you find Charlie Resnick. This is a good thing for readers who enjoy the Resnick novels.

With Elder many of the quirky features are softened or spread more widely. Elder has a family, dysfunctional of course and the challenges of a teenage daughter providing greater drama than Resnick’s cats.

As a retired policeman Elder has greater freedom of action with fewer jurisdictional restrictions. This allows Harvey greater variety in his settings and consequently a richer cast of characters to explore.

Harvey’s love of food and music are still there, only now other character’s tastes are presented, helping to give a picture of these characters.

Harvey’s casting of Frank Elder as an ex-policeman makes the character more in the hardboiled mold of the loner coming into town to right all the wrongs on his own. This frees Elder from some of the constraints of office politics and able to take on larger issues of examining the ills of modern society.

Raymond Chandler’s “The simple art of Murder” first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1944.